Reproducible computational environments using containers

This lesson provides an introduction to using the Apptainer container platform. Apptainer is particularly suited to running containers on infrastructure where users don’t have administrative privileges, for example shared infrastructure such as High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters.

This lesson will introduce Apptainer from scratch showing you how to run a simple container and building up to creating your own containers and running parallel scientific workloads on HPC infrastructure.

Prerequisites

You will need a NeSI account, and be a member of an active project. See the setup page for more information on how to use the NeSI Jupyter service.

For further developing containers you may wish to have access to a local or remote Linux-based system on which you have administrator (root) access > and can install the Apptainer software.

Schedule

		Setup	Download files required for the lesson
Day 1	11:00	1. Getting Started with Containers	What is a container and why might I want to use it?
	11:20	2. The Container Cache	Why does Apptainer use a local cache? Where does Apptainer store images? How do I configure my cache to work on NeSI?
	11:40	3. Using containers to run commands	How do I use container software on the cluster? How do I run different commands within a container? How do I access an interactive shell within a container?
	12:00	4. Files in containers	How do I make data available in a container? What data is made available by default in a container?
	12:30	5. Lunch	Break
	13:30	6. Creating Container Images	How can I make my own Apptainer container images? How do I document the ‘recipe’ for a Apptainer container image
	14:00	7. Building Container Images	How do I create my own Apptainer images?
	14:35	Finish

The actual schedule may vary slightly depending on the topics and exercises chosen by the instructor.