ACES: Charliecloud Containers for Scientific Workflows (Tutorial)

Description This tutorial introduces the use of Containers using the Charliecloud software suite. This tutorial will provide participants with background and hands-on experience to use basic Charliecloud containers for HPC applications. We discuss what containers are, why they matter for HPC, and how they work. We'll give an overview of Charliecloud, the unprivileged container solution from Los Alamos National Laboratory's HPC Division. Students will learn how to build toy containers and containerize real HPC applications, and then run them on a cluster. Exercises are demonstrated using the ACES cluster, a composable accelerator testbed at Texas A&M University. Students with an allocation on the ACES cluster can follow along with the ACES-specific exercises.