Magic Tools to Install - Manage Software Part 1: Singularity Container

Installing and managing software packages often poses a challange to HPC users on Linux systems without root permission. This two-part mini series is aiming at introducing helpful tools to remedy that.

This part will feature container technology and the software Singularity (a.k.a. Apptainer), a popular implementation of containers on HPC. Containers are gaining increasing popularities for its flexibility and portability. More and more developers now start to release their software packages as working containers for users' convenience. In this training, we will discuss how to use Singularity to run container images on our clusters, acquire more container images, and build your own container images. We will also showcase the usage of containerized popular packages such as Tensorflow and PyTorch.

Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of HPC environment and Linux is preferred but not required.