Variations in High Performance Computing (HPC) system software configurationsmean that applications are typically configured and built for specific HPCenvironments. Building applications can require a significant investment oftime and effort for application users and requires application users to haveadditional technical knowledge. Container technologies like Docker bring greatbenefits to the application development, build and deployment processes. Whilemuch cloud computing infrastructure is already designed to support Docker,little work has been done to support production Docker deployment on HPCsystems. In this work, we propose a Docker-enabled Build and ExecutionEnvironment (BEE) for HPC systems and detail a standard backend for BEE usingvirtual machines, the BEE-VM. This brings many of the benefits of Docker toexisting HPC machines in user-space without the requirement of specializedpre-installed software and with no system administrator configuration. We showthat current HPC application can be easily configured to run within BEE,eliminating the need to reconfigure and rebuild applications for differentsystems while preserving comparable performance.
展开▼
