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 …