HPC centers are facing a swelling request for bigger software flexibility to provision speedier and more miscellaneous modernization in computational technical work. Containers, which use Linux kernel structures to allow a client to alternate their own software stack for that installed on the host, is a progressively common technique to offer this flexibility. In our research, we will configure and test the performance and functions of a low overhead containerized cluster with HPC workloads. We will use Intel Quantum Simulator (Intel-QS) as the final workload. Intel-QS simulates quantum circuits and takes advantage of multi-core and multinode architectures. The Intel-QS uses MPI protocol to handle communication between nodes in the cluster. When it comes to container engine, we will start with Podman or Singularity. Podman tool is daemon-less, and the containers can even be run as a non-privileged user. It is easy to secure the host kernel from breakout attacks and it works well with the MPI because it uses the fork/exec model for containers instead of the client/server model. Singularity is specifically built for scientific and high-performance use cases. It has built-in support for MPI. We will use Kubernetes for container orchestration in the cluster.
Aadesh Baskar is a HPC/QC master’s student at DIT. He worked in the field of industrial automation before starting his master’s degree.
Huseyn Gurbanov is a HPC/QC master student at DIT and his practical experience includes robotics, drone programming, UAV systems and testing of hardware. He is also working on solving hard math problems besides publisher on the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). His work is published on College Mathematical Journal on September 2019.