Apptainer (formerly known as Singularity) is a container platform. It allows you to create and run containers that package up pieces of software in a way that is portable and reproducible. You can build a container using Singularity on your laptop, and then run it on many of the largest HPC clusters in the world, local university or company clusters, a single server, in the cloud, or on a workstation down the hall.
Your container is a single file, and you don’t have to worry about how to install all the software you need on each different operating system.
Apptainer is optimized for compute focused enterprise and HPC workloads, allowing untrusted users to run untrusted containers in a trusted way.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Verifiable reproducibility and security, using cryptographic signatures, an immutable container image format, and in-memory decryption.
- Integration over isolation by default. Easily make use of GPUs, high speed networks, parallel filesystems on a cluster or server by default.
- Mobility of compute. The single file SIF container format is easy to transport and share.
- A simple, effective security model. You are the same user inside a container as outside, and cannot gain additional privilege on the host system by default.
- Supports natively high-performance interconnects, such as InfiniBand and Intel Omni-Path Architecture (OPA).
- Supports any PCIe-attached device within the compute node, such as graphic accelerators.
- Native support for Open MPI library by utilizing a hybrid MPI container approach where OpenMPI exists both inside and outside the container.
Website: github.com/apptainer/apptainer
Support: Documentation
Developer: Gregory M. Kurtzer and contributors
License: 3-clause BSD License
Apptainer is written in Go. Learn Go with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Containers | |
|---|---|
| Docker | Create, deploy, and run applications by using containers |
| LXC | Userspace interface for the Linux kernel containment features |
| containerd | Industry-standard container runtime |
| Apptainer | Optimized for compute focused enterprise and HPC workloads |
| Kata Containers | Uses a hypervisor to provide isolation when spawning containers |
| OpenVz | Container-based virtualization |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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