SIParCS 2023 - Si Chen

Containerization of Simulation Applications for Frequently Re-Run Configurations

Recorded Talk

Container technology is rapidly developing, and we wonder if it can help to reduce data storage. With containers, we can run a scientific application with the required OS, software stacks, configurations, initialization/grid files, and input data on current supercomputers. Then we rebuild containers with an older version of MPI (Message Passing Interface) or OS to check if it still can run successfully. In this way, we can validate the re-run capability of containers in the long term. If this workflow works, we can use this method to re-run the old simulation whenever we need it. Thus when scientists try to save large amounts of data from simulations, we can urge them to use this container strategy to re-run their applications at any time and only save some small amount of data instead. The project will focus on using Singularity containers to automate the compilation process of a scientific simulation CM1 with various MPI versions. Basically, students will first manually build CM1, then create container images to automatically build it and test it on Casper, and finally change MPI versions to see if the container images will still be able to run on Casper. The final step will confirm the re-run capability of the containers.

Mentors: Haiying Xu, Sheri Mickelson, Jian Sun

Slides and poster