Overview

What is Charliecloud?

Charliecloud provides user-defined software stacks (UDSS) for high-performance computing (HPC) centers. This “bring your own software stack” functionality addresses needs such as:

• software dependencies that are numerous, complex, unusual, differently configured, or simply newer/older than what the center provides;

• build-time requirements unavailable within the center, such as relatively unfettered internet access;

• validated software stacks and configuration to meet the standards of a particular field of inquiry;

• portability of environments between resources, including workstations and other test and development system not managed by the center;

• consistent environments, even archivally so, that can be easily, reliably, and verifiably reproduced in the future; and/or

• usability and comprehensibility.

How does it work?

Charliecloud uses Linux user namespaces to run containers with no privileged operations or daemons and minimal configuration changes on center resources. This simple approach avoids most security risks while maintaining access to the performance and functionality already on offer.

Container images can be built using Docker or anything else that can generate a standard Linux filesystem tree.

How do I learn more?

• Documentation: https://hpc.github.io/charliecloud

• GitHub repository: https://github.com/hpc/charliecloud

• Low-traffic mailing list for announcements: https://groups.io/g/charliecloud

• We wrote an article for USENIX’s magazine ;login: that explains in more detail the motivation for Charliecloud and the technology upon which it is based: https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/fall2017/priedhorsky

• For technical papers about Charliecloud, refer to the Technical publications section below.

Who is responsible?

Contributors:

• Richard Berger <rberger@lanl.gov>

• Lucas Caudill <lcaudill@lanl.gov>

• Rusty Davis <rustyd@lanl.gov>

• Hunter Easterday <heasterday@lanl.gov>

• Oliver Freyermuth <o.freyermuth@googlemail.com>

• Shane Goff <rgoff@lanl.gov>

• Michael Jennings <mej@lanl.gov>

• Christoph Junghans <junghans@lanl.gov>

• Dave Love <dave.love@manchester.ac.uk>

• Jordan Ogas <jogas@lanl.gov>

• Kevin Pelzel <kpelzel@lanl.gov>

• Megan Phinney <mphinney@lanl.gov>

• Reid Priedhorsky <reidpr@lanl.gov>, co-founder and project lead

• Tim Randles <trandles@lanl.gov>, co-founder

• Benjamin “The Storm” Stormer <bstormer@lanl.gov>

• Meisam Tabriz <meisam.tabriz@mpcdf.mpg.de>

• Matthew Vernon <mv3@sanger.ac.uk>

• Peter Wienemann <wienemann@physik.uni-bonn.de>

• Lowell Wofford <lowell@lanl.gov>

How can I participate?

Use our GitHub page: https://github.com/hpc/charliecloud

Bug reports and feature requests should be filed as “Issues”. Questions, comments, support requests, and everything else should use our “Discussions”. Don’t worry if you put something in the wrong place; we’ll be more than happy to help regardless.

We also have a mailing list for announcements: https://groups.io/g/charliecloud

Patches are much appreciated on the software itself as well as documentation. Optionally, please include in your first patch a credit for yourself in the list above.

We are friendly and welcoming of diversity on all dimensions.

Technical publications

If Charliecloud helped your research, or it was useful to you in any other context where bibliographic citations are appropriate, please cite the following open-access paper:

Reid Priedhorsky and Tim Randles. “Charliecloud: Unprivileged containers for user-defined software stacks in HPC”, 2017. In Proc. Supercomputing. DOI: 10.1145/3126908.3126925.

Note: This paper contains out-of-date number for the size of Charliecloud’s code. Please instead use the current number in the FAQ.

Other publications:

• We compare the performance of three HPC-specific container technologies against bare metal, finding no concerns about performance degradation.

  Alfred Torrez, Tim Randles, and Reid Priedhorsky. “HPC container runtimes have minimal or no performance impact”, 2019. In Proc. CANOPIE HPC Workshop @ SC. DOI: 10.1109/CANOPIE-HPC49598.2019.00010.

• A demonstration of how low-privilege containers solve increasing demand for software flexibility.

  Reid Priedhorsky, R. Shane Canon, Timothy Randles, and Andrew J. Younge. “Minimizing privilege for building HPC containers”, 2021. In Proc. Supercomputing. DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.14396099.

• Charliecloud’s build cache performs competitively with the standard many-layered union filesystem approach and has structural advantages including a better diff format, lower cache overhead, and better file de-duplication.

  Reid Priedhorsky, Jordan Ogas, Claude H. (Rusty) Davis IV, Z. Noah Hounshel, Ashlyn Lee, Benjamin Stormer, and R. Shane Goff. “Charliecloud’s layer-free, Git-based container build cache”, 2023. In Proc. Supercomputing. DOI: 10.1145/3624062.3624585.

License and intellectual property

Charliecloud is open source software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0. A copy is included in file LICENSE. You may not use this software except in compliance with the license.

Copyrights and patents are retained by contributors. No copyright assignment is required to contribute to Charliecloud.

Note

This documentation is for Charliecloud version 0.39~pre+a1fe557 and was built 2024-09-16 13:27 -0600.