Singularity 2016

Introduction

Singularity is a portable application stack packaging and runtime utility. With Singularity, you can provide whole working environments and install the OS and Software you neet to use within a container. In the best case, "this means that you don’t have to ask your cluster admin to install anything for you - you can put it in a Singularity container and run."[¹ http://singularity.lbl.gov/]

Installed version

The currently installed version is available on environment hpc-env/6.4

Singularity/2.4.2-GCCcore-6.4.0

Using Singularity

Singularity can be a very powerful tool to create containers with your favoured OS environment and all the tools that you need - completely without the help or permission of the HPC administrators. But in order to use Singularity, you need to create your own containers on your own local device since you need root permissions to do so which is not possible on our cluster. in the following steps we will show you exemplarily how to create your own containers, fill them with the software you need and how you use them to do your work.

WORK IN PROGRESS

If you want to find out more about Singularity on the HPC Cluster, you can use the command

module spider Singularity

This will show you basic informations e.g. a short description and the currently installed version.

To load the desired version of the module, use the command, e.g.

module load hpc-env/6.4
module load Singularity

Always remember: this command is case sensitive!

To get familiar with the commands and options available for Singularity, you can use the help function:

singularity --help

Documentation

The developers offer a detailed website with further information and a Quick Stard Guide.