Apptainer (formerly Singularity) is a container system designed for use on High Performance Computing (HPC) systems. It allows users to run both Docker and Singularity containers.
From the Docker website: "A container image is a lightweight, stand-alone, executable package of a piece of software that includes everything needed to run it: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, settings."
singularity
(apptainer
is the official command). Thus, user should continue running containers on OSC systems without any issue: 1. Containers built with Apptainer will continue to work with installations of Singularity.
2. User will see warnings about
SINGULARITY_
and SINGULARITYENV_
environment variables.A future version of Apptainer may stop supporting environment variable compatibility so we recommned
users to add respective
APPTAINER_
and APPTAINERENV
_ counterparts in their job environments.For more detail, pleae visit the Singularity Compatibility page.
If you experience issues using Singularity after downtime, please contact OSC help.
Availability and Restrictions
Versions
Apptainer/Singularity is available on all OSC clusters. Only one version is available at any given time. To find out the current version:
apptainer version
Check the release page for the changelog: https://github.com/apptainer/apptainer/releases
Access
Apptainer/Singularity is available to all OSC users.
Publisher/Vendor/Repository and License Type
Apptainer project, established as Apptainer a Series of LF Projects LLC; 3-clause BSD License
Usage
Set-up
No setup is required. You can use Apptainer/Singularity directly on all clusters.
Using Apptainer/Singularity
See HOWTO: Use Docker and Singularity Containers at OSC for information about using Apptainer/Singularity on all OSC clusters, including some site-specific caveats.
Example: Run a container from the Singularity hub
[pitzer-login01]$ apptainer run shub://singularityhub/hello-world INFO: Downloading library image Tacotacotaco
Known Issues
Workshop
- 2019-05-14 OSC Workshop: Containers for Research Computing. Please find the link in the workshop page for the tutorial material and slides.