Singularity Containers

This workshop provides researchers in the humanities, arts, and sciences an opportunity to become familiar with containerization tools, which are in wide use in the research computing world. The workshop will introduce the tools and provide hands-on experience. Researchers with software they want to package -- or "containerize" -- for use on the cluster or elsewhere will be able to do so. We will introduce Gitlab-CI (https://about.gitlab.com/features/gitlab-ci-cd/) and Singularity (https://sylabs.io) and tools that OIT programmers have built to automate the production of "cluster-ready" Singularity containers. Who should take part? Users of the Duke Compute Cluster; researchers who are using software with specific and perhaps exotic library dependencies; researchers who are using computers at other locations, including XSEDE supercomputers, Open Science Grid (OSG), or computers shared with colleagues at other institutions, researchers who want to increase the likelihood that their computational methods are transportable and reproducible. Time will be available for participants to ask questions about building their own containers.