HPC-Europa3 - D12.1 - Container-as-a-service analysis report

The main goal of this report is to evaluate the use of container technology in order to streamline the deployment of HPC end-user applications. Each application to be deployed typically has a number of dependencies in terms of supported versions of the OS, compilers and linked libraries, which make the maintenance of the different installations complex and error prone on typical HPC systems. The implementation of a lightweight virtualization strategy can strongly improve both the management of the HPC systems and the portability of end-user applications to different HPC centres. This report reviews the considerations necessary and the current status of some of the competing implementations and proposes a suitable architecture relevant to HPC environments.