Linux containers have garnered a considerable amount of interest in a very short amount of time. Docker, in par- ticular, has captured a lot of this momentum – and is of- ten viewed as the de-facto standard for lightweight software deployment. Containerized applications can be quickly deployed, providing a virtual software environment (as op- posed to a more traditional virtual machine) with little to no performance overhead. We believe Docker, and the modern trend toward containers and microservices it epitomizes, can provide a significant technological advantage for service deployment in an HPC environment. We present several use cases for containers, ranging from simple web application delivery to prototype compute cluster environments. Finally, we share our initial performance results, and our upcoming plans for container development at our site.
Authentication for HPC resources has always been a double edged issue. On one hand, HPC facilities would like users to login as easily as possible, but with the increase and complexity of system exploits, HPC centers would like to protect their systems to the highest degree possible, which often leads to complicated login mechanisms. While solutions like Two Factor authentication are optimal from a system administration view point, user buy in hasn't been as vociferous as one would hope. In this paper we discuss the implementation of an alternate solution, CILogon, at NICS. We start with a brief overview of CILogon and then delve into the implementation details. We discuss how we incorporated CILogon to enable users to use their campus credentials to login to the NICS user portal as well our compute resource Darter. We discuss the issues we faced during implementation and the strategies we implemented to overcome them.
