Apptainer
Description
Apptainer/Singularity is an application containerization solution for High-Performance Computing (HPC). The goal of Apptainer is to allow for "mobility of computing": an application containerized on one Linux system should be able to run on another system, as it is, and without the need to reconcile software dependencies and Linux version differences between the source and target systems.
More information
- Homepage: https://apptainer.org
Available Versions of Apptainer
Version | Module | Available on |
---|---|---|
1.3.4-GCCcore-13.3.0 | tools/Apptainer/1.3.4-GCCcore-13.3.0 | Noctua 2 |
1.2.5-GCCcore-11.3.0 | tools/Apptainer/1.2.5-GCCcore-11.3.0 | Noctua 2 |
1.1.9-GCCcore-11.3.0 | tools/Apptainer/1.1.9-GCCcore-11.3.0 | Noctua 2 |
This table is generated automatically. If you need other versions please click pc2-support@uni-paderborn.de.
Usage Hints for Apptainer
If you need support in using this software or example job scripts please click pc2-support@uni-paderborn.de.
To use Apptainer, load the module
module load tools Apptainer
for the most recent version or, for example
module load tools/Apptainer/1.1.9-GCCcore-11.3.0
for a specific version.
Apptainer and Singularity
Here we would like to disentangle the naming confusing about Singularity and Apptainer, see also Singularity history on Wikipedia:
Singularity was the name of the original research project started at Lawrence Berkeley National in 2015
SingularityCE: open-source Singularity supported by Sylabs
Apptainer: open-source Singularity hosted by the Linux Foundation
How do Apptainer and SingularityCE compare
they are compatible and practically the same
same command line arguments, same environment variables
containers created with one of them can be used with the other without any conversion
practically, you can replace
singularity
in the commands in Singularity-Introduction withapptainer
after loading the Apptainer-moduleApptainer comes with a symbolic link to
singularity
, i.e. after loading the Apptainer module, you can use your singularity commands as usual
Apptainer and SingularityCE at PC2:
SingularityCE is installed in setuid mode at PC2
this makes it independent of user namespaces
Apptainer is installed in user-name space mode at PC2
this allows for additional functionality, like building containers directly on the HPC system
Creating Containers directly on the HPC System
As Apptainer is configured to use user namespaces on PC2 systems, you can create containers directly on the frontends of the HPC systems, e.g. with a recipe like
BootStrap: docker
From: ubuntu:22.04
%post
mkdir /pc2
apt-get -y update
apt-get -y install htop vim
%environment
export LC_ALL=C
%runscript
echo "hello from container"
%labels
Author blub
and the command
apptainer build ubuntu.sif ubuntu.recipe
Please be aware that you should set the environment variables for the cache and tmp-dir as explained in Singularity-Introduction | Ensuring Enough Storage Space .