Charliecloud provides user-defined software stacks (UDSS) for high-performance computing (HPC) centers. This "bring your own software stack" functionality addresses needs such as:
- software dependencies that are numerous, complex, unusual, differently configured, or simply newer/older than what the center provides;
- build-time requirements unavailable within the center, such as relatively unfettered internet access;
- validated software stacks and configuration to meet the standards of a particular field of inquiry;
- portability of environments between resources, including workstations and other test and development system not managed by the center;
- consistent environments, even archivally so, that can be easily, reliabily, and verifiably reproduced in the future; and/or
- usability and comprehensibility.
WARNING: Cray CLE in recent versions has a bug that crashes nodes when cleaning up after some jobs, including if Charliecloud has been used. See the installation instructions for a workaround.
Charliecloud uses Linux user namespaces to run containers with no privileged operations or daemons and minimal configuration changes on center resources. This simple approach avoids most security risks while maintaining access to the performance and functionality already on offer.
Container images can be built using Docker or anything else that can generate a standard Linux filesystem tree.
Because user namespaces are available only in newer kernel versions, an experimental setuid mode is also provided to let sites evaluate Charliecloud even if they do not have user namespace-capable kernels readily available.
- Documentation: https://hpc.github.io/charliecloud
- GitHub repository: https://github.com/hpc/charliecloud
- We wrote an article for USENIX's magazine ;login: that explains in more detail the motivation for Charliecloud and the technology upon which it is based: https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/fall2017/priedhorsky
- A more technical resource is our Supercomputing 2017 paper: http://permalink.lanl.gov/object/tr?what=info:lanl-repo/lareport/LA-UR-16-22370
The core Charliecloud team at Los Alamos is:
- Reid Priedhorsky <reidpr@lanl.gov>, co-founder and BDFL
- Tim Randles <trandles@lanl.gov>, co-founder
- Michael Jennings <mej@lanl.gov>
Patches (code, documentation, etc.) contributed by:
- Reid Priedhorsky <reidpr@lanl.gov>
- Oliver Freyermuth <o.freyermuth@googlemail.com>
- Matthew Vernon <mv3@sanger.ac.uk>
- Lowell Wofford <lowell@lanl.gov>
Questions, comments, feature requests, bug reports, etc. can be directed to:
- our mailing list: charliecloud@groups.io or https://groups.io/g/charliecloud
- issues on GitHub
Patches are much appreciated on the software itself as well as documentation. Optionally, please include in your first patch a credit for yourself in the list above.
We are friendly and welcoming of diversity on all dimensions.