Introduction

Overview

Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• What are we learning in this course?

Objectives

• Understand the point of this course.

URL: http://pawseysupercomputing.github.io/container-workflows

About this course

This course is an introduction to the use of a technology called ‘Containers’. The second section of the course will discuss this in more detail, how containers differ from Virtual Machines (VMs), and how you can use containers to simplify and improve your workflows.

The later sections will take you through the use of containers in two specific computing contexts at Pawsey. These two contexts are Nimbus, the cloud computing research service, and Zeus, the shared memory high performance computing (HPC) facility at Pawsey. Pawsey has a third major computing facility, Magnus, a tier-1 HPC facility. At the moment running containers on Magnus is outside the scope of this course (this will be added soon).

If you have experience with Nimbus or job scheduling with Slurm, then this course will be slightly easier, jhowewver this experience is not required. Scripts and commands you need to enter are in the course materials.

The purpose of this course is to get some hands-on experience with containers and to appreciate how you can use containers to move workflows between quite different systems.

About Today

This is a (mostly) hands-on course. For most of today you can use your login details (provided) to use a terminal in our Jupyterhub at

https://hub.pawsey.org.au/

You can use your own laptop if you have some experience with command line work.

Key Points

• This course is an introduction to the utility of containers at Pawsey