Container Engines on our GPU servers

Context

Containerization is becoming a standard in the scientific community when there's a need to make jobs run idempotently on different computing environments. Our GPU servers support both Apptainer (AKA "Singularity") and Podman (Docker containers without the Docker mess on multi-user environments).

Singularity

Singularity's main advantage is the ability to develop containers that can be run on HPC environments. This enables you to sketch out what you want to do on a decently beefy machine, and then run the full workload on HPC environments like the Science Cluster, knowing that it will go through on the first shot.

Podman

The simplicity of a Dockerfile without the security concerns.