Evaluation of Docker Containers for Scientific Workloads in the Cloud
Pankaj Saha, Angel M. Beltre, Piotr W. Umiński, Madhusudhan Govindaraju · 2018
The HPC community is actively researching and evaluating tools to support execution of scientific applications in cloud-based environments. Among the various technologies, containers have recently gained importance as they have significantly better performance compared to full-scale virtualization, support for microservices and DevOps, and work seamlessly with workflow and orchestration tools. Docker is currently the leader in containerization technology because it offers low overhead, flexibility, portability of applications, and reproducibility. Singularity is another container solution that is of interest as it is designed specifically for scientific applications. It is important to conduct performance and feature analysis of the container technologies to understand their applicability for each application and target execution environment.