Sandia researchers in the Center for Computing Research collaborated with engineers from Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions for enterprise computing, to enable more robust production container capabilities for high-performance computing (HPC) systems. CCR researchers demonstrated the use of Podman, which allows ordinary users to build and run containers without needing the elevated security privileges of an administrator, on the Stria machine at Sandia. Stria is an unclassified version of Astra, which was the first petascale HPC system based on an Arm processor. While Arm processors have shown to be very capable for HPC workloads, they are not as prevalent in laptops and workstations as other processors. To address this limitation, Podman provides the ability to build containers directly on machines like Stria and Astra without requiring root-level access. This capability is a critical advancement in container functionality for the HPC application development environment. The CCR team is continuing to work with Red Hat on improving Podman for traditional HPC applications as well as machine learning and deep learning workloads. More details on this collaboration can be found here:
