Apptainer

Introduction

Apptainer is free software for containerizing applications.

Availability

Apptainer is available across all our systems.

Usage

Using containers on our systems amounts to loading the software and starting the image. On Tinkercliffs/Infer, to run a Jupyter container with Julia:

module load containers/apptainer
apptainer exec --bind=/work,/projects,`pwd`:/opt/julia/logs \
    /projects/arcsingularity/AMD/ood-jupyter-datascience_tcamd_1Dec2020.sif julia

The above commands load the singularity software using our module system, then starts Julia within the container. To make data from our main storage locations available within the container, we use the --bind command. Additionally, Julia wants to write logs to /opt/julia/logs/. Since the container is not writable, we need to bind a mountable location to that container location as given by pwd:/opt/julia/logs. This makes the current location available IN the container as /opt/julia/logs/ and allows Julia to create a log file.

Container building workflow

Because Apptainer can build from DockerHub and the public help via Google searches is vastly greater when creating Docker images, our general recommendation is to take advantage of this.

Our workflow is to:

create a docker image
push docker image to dockerhub
apptainer build image.sif docker://<docker user>/image:tag