Enabling Message Passing Interface Containers on the LUMI Supercomputer

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for deploying MPI-based containerized applications on the LUMI supercomputer, enabling users to achieve optimal performance while simplifying application management.

Contribution

It introduces an approach for building and running MPI containers on LUMI, facilitating performance-optimized container deployment on supercomputers.

Findings

Users can build and run MPI containers with expected performance

MPI containers can be provided as base images on LUMI

Concepts are applicable to other supercomputers

Abstract

Containers represent a convenient way of packing applications with dependencies for easy user-level installation and productivity. When running on supercomputers, it becomes crucial to optimize the containers to exploit the performance optimizations provided by the system vendors. In this paper, we discuss an approach we have developed for deploying containerized applications on the LUMI supercomputer, specifically for running applications based on Message Passing Interface (MPI) parallelization. We show how users can build and run containers and get the expected performance. The proposed MPI containers can be provided on LUMI so that users can use them as base images. Although we only refer to the LUMI supercomputer, similar concepts can be applied to the case of other supercomputers.