What is Singularity

Singularity is a container platform to run complex applications on HPC clusters in a simple, portable, and reproducible way. It supports Docker images and is an alternative to Docker, whose security model and execution mode are not well-suited in an HPC environment.

Major features:

  • Verifiable reproducibility and security, using cryptographic signatures, an immutable container image format, and in-memory decryption.
  • Integration over isolation by default. Easily make use of GPUs, high speed networks, parallel filesystems on a cluster or server by default.
  • Mobility of compute. The single file SIF container format is easy to transport and share.
  • A simple, effective security model. You are the same user inside a container as outside, and cannot gain additional privilege on the host system by default.

Module

To setup required environment variables for Singularity, please use following command

System Command
HPC2021 module load singularity/3.8.0

Available Images

Available singularity images are located under /share1/singularity/simg/ in HPC2021 system.

 

Additional Information

Singularity Reference Manual

  1. Installing Singularity platform
  2. Building Singularity images
  3. Running Singularity images

Container Image Catalogs

  1. NVIDIA NGC 
  2. Docker Hub