Containers, Portability, and Performance Assessment of Numerical Weather Prediction Applications

Whitcomb, Timothy (US Naval Research Laboratory)

Category:
Container Implementation and/or Deployment

Software containers have become a standard method for developers, particularly in a fast-paced DevSecOps environment. While their use in HPC applications are less widespread than in the broader software development community, software containers have proven useful to improve portability of HPC applications between platforms. In this presentation, we will discuss several recent efforts with HPCMP PET program to eliminate key pain points in using Singularity containers for weather forecasting applications, as well how those efforts have assisted projects to test portability and performance in on-premises HPCMP systems and cloud environments. We show how some problems are solved, but that there is no panacea for all portability and performance challenges.