In this episode of the Exascale Computing Project’s (ECP) Let’s Talk Exascale podcast series, Andrew Younge of Sandia National Laboratories discusses container technology and how it fits into the wider scheme of exascale and high-performance computing (HPC).
Container technology has revolutionized software development by providing greater software flexibility, reliability, ease of deployment and portability. But as Younge notes, several challenges must be addressed to get containers ready for exascale computing. The Supercontainers project, a new ECP effort, aims to deliver containers and virtualization technologies for productivity, portability, and performance on the first exascale computing machines.
Younge, interviewed in November during the SC21 conference, provided this perspective on containers: “Essentially, it allows you to encompass your entire environment in a simple and reproducible way. So not only do I have my container image that has my application and my entire software stack with it, I also have a manifest for how I got there. That’s a really important notion for many people.”
