Container solutions for HPC Systems: A Case Study of Using Shifter on Blue Waters

Software container solutions have revolutionized application devel-opment approaches by enabling lightweight platform abstractionswithin the so-called “containers.” Several solutions are being ac-tively developed in attempts to bring the benefits of containers tohigh-performance computing systems with their stringent secu-rity demands on the one hand and fundamental resource sharingrequirements on the other.In this paper, we discuss the benefits and short-comings of suchsolutions when deployed on real HPC systems and applied to pro-duction scientific applications. We highlight use cases that are eitherenabled by or significantly benefit from such solutions. We discussthe efforts by HPC system administrators and support staff to sup-port users of these type of workloads on HPC systems not initiallydesigned with these workloads in mind focusing on the NCSA BlueWaters system.