The Linux Foundation recently announced to host the Apptainer project designed to execute applications at bare-metal performance while being secure, portable and completely reproducible.
Formerly the Singularity project, Apptainer is the most widely used container system for High-Performance (HPC) computing and is one of the container systems uniquely suited for both enterprise and HPC use cases.
The HPC community for many years has been isolated from the enterprise and cloud sectors of the ecosystem, but those barriers are starting to come down. HPC consumers are looking to modernise and take advantage of enterprise tech and enterprises are looking to make use of decades of optimisations in performance and parallelisation through use-cases like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and compute- and data-driven analytics, LF said.
“The Apptainer project is at a pivotal moment in its growth and evolution,” said Mike Dolan, senior vice president and general manager of projects at the Linux Foundation. “We look forward to supporting this community and enabling cross collaboration with even more open source developers and technologists to expand its ecosystem of contributors.”
Apptainer features include: public/private key signing of containers; Docker- and OCI-compatible; container encryption and integration with Vault and other management platforms; single-file SIF executable container format; runs “rootless” and prohibits privilege escalation within the container; and supports GPU, FPGA, high-speed networks and filesystems, among others.
