[Beowulf] LXD containers for cluster services and cgroups?

[John Hearns]

Lance, thankyou very much for the reply. I will look at Docker for those
'system' type tasks also.

Regarding Singularity does anyone know much about Singularity integration
with PBSPro?
I guess I could actually ask Altair....


On 16 June 2017 at 01:30, Lance Wilson <lance.wilson at monash.edu> wrote:

> Hi John,
> In regards to your Singularity question we are using cgroups for the
> containers. Mostly the containers are used in Slurm jobs which creates the
> appropriate cgroups. We are also using the gpu driver passthrough
> functionality of Singularity now for our machine learning and cryoem
> processing containers which have the cgroups applied to gpus.
>
> Back to your systems containers questions many of our systems have been
> put into docker containers as they run on same/similar operating system and
> still need root to function correctly. Pretty much every new system thing
> we do is scripted and put into a container so that we can recover quickly
> in an outage scenario and move around things as part of our larger cloud
> (private and public) strategy.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Lance
> --
> Dr Lance Wilson
> Senior HPC Consultant
> Ph: 03 99055942 (+61 3 99055942 <+61%203%209905%205942>
> Mobile: 0437414123 (+61 4 3741 4123)
> Multi-modal Australian ScienceS Imaging and Visualisation Environment
> (www.massive.org.au)
> Monash University
>
> On 15 June 2017 at 20:06, John Hearns <hearnsj at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>> I'm not sure this post is going to make a lot of sense. But please bear
>> with me!
>> For applications containers are possible using Singularity or Docker of
>> course.
>>
>> In HPC clusters we tend to have several 'service node' activities, such
>> as the cluster management/ head node, perhaps separate provisioning nodes
>> to spread the load, batch queue system masters, monitoring setups, job
>> submission and dedicated storage nodes.
>>
>> These can all of course be run on a single cluster head node in a small
>> setup (with the exception of the storage nodes).  In a larger setup you can
>> run these services in virtual machines.
>>
>> What I am asking is anyone using technologies such as LXD containers to
>> run these services?
>> I was inspired by an Openstack talk by James Page at Canonical, where all
>> the Opestack services were deployed by Juju charms onto LXD containers.
>> So we pack all the services into containers on physical server(s) which
>> makes moving them or re-deploying things very flexible.
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5orzBITR3X8
>>
>> While I'm talking abotu containers, is anyone deploying singularity
>> containers in cgroups, and limiting the resources they can use (I'm
>> specifically thinking of RDMA here).
>>
>>
>>
>> ps. I have a terrible sense of deja vu here... I think I asked the
>> Singularity question a month ago.
>> I plead insanity m'lord
>>
>>
>>
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