Opportunities for container environments on Cray XC 30 with GPU devices
Thanks to the significant popularity gained lately by Docker, the HPC community has recently started exploring container technology and potential benefits its use would bring to the users of supercomputing systems like the Cray XC series. In this paper, we explore feasibility of diverse, nontraditional data and computing oriented use cases with practically no overhead thus achieving native execution performance. Working in close collaboration with NERSC and an engineering team at Nvidia, CSCS is working on extending the Shifter framework in order to enable GPU access to containers at scale. We also briefly discuss the implications of using containers within a shared HPC system from the security point of view to provide service that does not compromise the stability of the system or the privacy of the use. Furthermore, we describe several valuable lessons learned through our analysis and share the challenges we encountered.