• Singularity is the Hinge To Swing HPC Cloud Adoption

  May 18, 2017 Nicole Hemsoth

  

  For almost a decade now, the cloud has been pitched as a cost-effective way to bring supercomputing out of the queue and into public IaaS or HPC on-demand environments. While there are certainly many use cases to prove that tightly-coupled problems can still work in the cloud despite latency hits (among other issues), application portability is one sticking point.

  For instance, let’s say you have developed a financial modeling application on an HPC on demand service to prove that the model works so you can make the case for purchasing a large cluster to run it at scale on-prem. This …

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• Red Hat Gears Up OpenShift For Developers

  May 2, 2017 Jeffrey Burt

  

  During the five years that Red Hat has been building out its OpenShift cloud applications platform, much of the focus has been on making it easier to use by customers looking to adapt to an increasingly cloud-centric world for both new and legacy applications. Just as it did with the Linux operating system through Red Hat Enterprise Linux and related middleware and tools, the vendor has worked to make it easier for enterprises to embrace OpenShift.

  That has included a major reworking of the platform with the release of version 3.0 last year, which ditched Red Hat’s in-house technologies for …

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• Docker Completes Its Platform With DIY Linux

  April 19, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  It all started with a new twist on an old idea, that of a lightweight software container running inside Linux that would house applications and make them portable. And now Docker is coming full circle and completing its eponymous platform by opening up the tools to allow users to create their own minimalist Linux operating system that is containerized and modular above the kernel and that only gives applications precisely what they need to run.

  The new LinuxKit is not so much a variant of Linux as a means of creating them. The toolkit for making Linuxes, which was unveiled …

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• Singularity Containers for HPC, Reproducibility, and Mobility

  April 10, 2017 Rob Farber

  

  Containers are an extremely mobile, safe and reproducible computing infrastructure that is now ready for production HPC computing. In particular, the freely available Singularity container framework has been designed specifically for HPC computing. The barrier to entry is low and the software is free.

  At the recent Intel HPC Developer Conference, Gregory Kurtzer (Singularity project lead and LBNL staff member) and Krishna Muriki (Computer Systems Engineer at LBNL) provided a beginning and advanced tutorial on Singularity. One of Kurtzer’s key takeaways: “setting up workflows in under a day is commonplace with Singularity”.

  Many people have heard about code modernization and …

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• Docker Reaches The Enterprise Milestone

  March 2, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  In the server virtualization era, there were a couple of virtual machine formats and hypervisors to match them, and despite the desire for a common VM format, the virtual server stacks got siloed into ESXi, KVM, Xen, and Hyper-V stacks with some spicing of PowerVM, Solaris containers and LDOMs, and VM/ESA partitions sprinkled on.

  With containers, the consensus has been largely to support the Docker format that was inspired by the foundational Linux container work done by Google, and Docker, the company, was the early and enthusiastic proponent of its way of the Docker way of doing containers.

  Now, Docker …

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• Solving HPC Conflicts with Containers

  March 2, 2017 Ben Cotton

  

  It’s an unavoidable truth of information technology that the operators and users are sometimes at odds with each other.

  Countless stories, comics, and television shows have driven home two very unpleasant stereotypes: the angry, unhelpful system administrator who can’t wait to say “no!” to a user request, and the clueless, clumsy user always a keystroke away from taking down the entire infrastructure. There is a kernel of truth to them. While both resource providers and resource users may want the same end result — the successful completion of computational tasks — they have conflicting priorities when it comes to achieving …

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• Bouncing Back To Private Clouds With OpenStack

  March 1, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  There is an adage, not quite yet old, suggesting that compute is free but storage is not. Perhaps a more accurate and, as far as public clouds are concerned, apt adaptation of this saying might be that computing and storage are free, and so are inbound networking within a region, but moving data across regions in a public cloud is brutally expensive, and it is even more costly spanning regions.

  So much so that, at a certain scale, it makes sense to build your own datacenter and create your own infrastructure hardware and software stack that mimics the salient characteristics …

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• Locking Down Docker To Open Up Enterprise Adoption

  February 10, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  It happens time and time again with any new technology. Coders create this new thing, it gets deployed as an experiment and, if it is an open source project, shared with the world. As its utility is realized, adoption suddenly spikes with the do-it-yourself crowd that is eager to solve a particular problem. And then, as more mainstream enterprises take an interest, the talk turns to security.

  It’s like being told to grow up by a grownup, to eat your vegetables. In fact, it isn’t like that at all. It is precisely that, and it is healthy for any technology …

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• A New Twist On Adding Data Persistence To Containers

  February 7, 2017 Jeffrey Burt

  

  Containers continue to gain momentum as organizations look for greater efficiencies and lower costs to run distributed applications in their increasingly virtualized datacenters as well as for improving their application development environments. As we have noted before, containers are becoming more common in the enterprise, though they still have a way to go before being fully embraced in high performance computing circles.

  There are myriad advantages to containers, from being able to spin them up much faster than virtual machine instances on hypervisors and to pack more containers than virtual machines on a host system to gaining efficiencies …

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• Making The Case For Containers

  October 4, 2016 Lars Herrmann

  

  Linux container technology is IT’s shiny new thing. Containers promise to ease application development and deployment, a necessity in a business environment where getting ahead of application demand can mean the difference between staying in business or not. Containers offer many benefits, but they are not a panacea, and it’s important to understand why, where and when to use them.

  Most IT pros recognize that application containers can provide a technological edge, one that translates into a clear business advantage. Containers unify and streamline application components – including the libraries and binaries upon which individual applications depend. Combining isolation with …

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