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Containers in Research: Initial Experiences with Lightweight Infrastructure

Published: 17 July 2016 Publication History

Abstract

HPC environments have traditionally existed installed directly on hardware or through virtual machine environments. Linux Containers, and Docker specifically, have gained extensive popularity; we believe this current trend toward containers and microservices can be applied to HPC to improve efficiency and quality of development and deployment. User interest in Docker is rising, with several communities planning production deployments. We describe some of our site's experiences, along with an autoscaling web cluster and an autoscaling PBS-based computational cluster we have developed that are currently in a pre-production testing phase. Some basic performance tests are covered, comparing network and filesystem performance between a native Docker environment and a traditional Red Hat-based environment. In our tests, we noticed negligible differences in computational performance when run out of the box, approximately 0.4%, but we required some minor tweaking in the form of additional docker plugins to achieve similar or better performance in the network and filesystem tests. While additional testing is needed for some aspects of computational clusters, particularly RDMA performance, we believe initial testing indicates Docker containers are ready for broader adoption at larger-scale production environments.

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  • (2023)Containerization for High Performance Computing Systems: Survey and ProspectsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2022.322922149:4(2722-2740)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
  • (2023)Scalable, High-Quality Scheduling of Data Center Workloads2023 IEEE/ACM 23rd International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing Workshops (CCGridW)10.1109/CCGridW59191.2023.00079(343-345)Online publication date: May-2023
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Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
XSEDE16: Proceedings of the XSEDE16 Conference on Diversity, Big Data, and Science at Scale
July 2016
405 pages
ISBN:9781450347556
DOI:10.1145/2949550
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 17 July 2016

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Author Tags

  1. Docker
  2. LXC
  3. cgroups
  4. container

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XSEDE16

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Overall Acceptance Rate 129 of 190 submissions, 68%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Cloud-Native Computing: A Survey From the Perspective of ServicesProceedings of the IEEE10.1109/JPROC.2024.3353855112:1(12-46)Online publication date: Jan-2024
  • (2023)Containerization for High Performance Computing Systems: Survey and ProspectsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2022.322922149:4(2722-2740)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
  • (2023)Scalable, High-Quality Scheduling of Data Center Workloads2023 IEEE/ACM 23rd International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing Workshops (CCGridW)10.1109/CCGridW59191.2023.00079(343-345)Online publication date: May-2023
  • (2022)A Docker Container Anomaly Monitoring System Based on Optimized Isolation ForestIEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing10.1109/TCC.2019.293572410:1(134-145)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2022
  • (2021)Towards a Secure, Distributed, and Reliable Cloud-Based Reference Architecture for Big Data in Smart CitiesResearch Anthology on Architectures, Frameworks, and Integration Strategies for Distributed and Cloud Computing10.4018/978-1-7998-5339-8.ch006(123-149)Online publication date: 2021
  • (2021)Container orchestration on HPC systems through KubernetesJournal of Cloud Computing10.1186/s13677-021-00231-z10:1Online publication date: 22-Feb-2021
  • (2021)Containerization and Orchestration on HPC SystemsSustained Simulation Performance 2019 and 202010.1007/978-3-030-68049-7_10(133-147)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2021
  • (2020)Contention-aware container placement strategy for docker swarm with machine learning based clustering algorithmsCluster Computing10.1007/s10586-020-03210-226:1(13-23)Online publication date: 24-Nov-2020
  • (2020)Improving Resource Isolation of Critical Tasks in a WorkloadJob Scheduling Strategies for Parallel Processing10.1007/978-3-030-63171-0_3(45-67)Online publication date: 16-Nov-2020
  • (2020)The state‐of‐the‐art in container technologies: Application, orchestration and securityConcurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience10.1002/cpe.566832:17Online publication date: 19-Jan-2020
  • Show More Cited By

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