Running Docker images using Shifter

When you want to run Docker containers on the Fidis/Gacrux cluster

Warning

We are still in beta phase. The installation will soon be improved with:

automatic account creation on the registry

The present documentation will be updated once the registry has been modified.

Running a Docker image with Shifter - Step by step

Prerequisite

You need to have Docker installed on your machine

Get a docker image from dockerhub for instance
```
$ docker pull alpine:latest
$ docker images
```
Account on the c4science registry
- Request an account
- Change your password on https://registry.c4science.ch

Set up your machine

Login on the registry from your local Docker installation

$ docker login registry.c4science.ch
Username (username): username
Password: 
Login Succeeded

Upload a Docker image to the registry
- On the web interface, create a Project on the registry (private or public)
- Tag the image you want to upload on your local machine and push it to the registry
  NOTE: Do not use the `-` character in the tag name, only letters, numbers and underscore
```
$ docker tag alpine:latest registry.c4science.ch/yourproject/alpine:latest
$ docker push registry.c4science.ch/yourproject/alpine:latest
```

Pull an image on Shifter and specify a user or group ACL

From each cluster frontend (i.e.: fidis.epfl.ch), login to the registry, pull the image and check it's was pulled with success.

$ shifterimg login
  default username: <username>
  default password:
$ shifterimg pull yourproject/alpine:latest
$ shifterimg images
tcm        docker     READY    9797e5e798   2018-03-15T16:00:59 yourproject/alpine:latest

You can specify one or multiple (separated by a comma) LDAP username and/or group so the image is only available to those people
```
$ id
$ shifterimg --group scitas-ge --user aubort,user2 pull yourproject/alpin
```
To update the user/group ACL you can re-run the pull command
The images are unique for each cluster (deneb, fidis, helvetios, izar)

To view the full info about the images (warning: JSON):

$ shifterimg -v images
Message: {
  "list": [
    {
      "ENTRY": null, 
      "ENV": [
        "PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin"
      ], 
      "WORKDIR": "MISSING", 
      "groupACL": [], 
      "id": "9797e5e798a034d53525968de25bd25c913e7bb17c6d068ebc778cb33e3ff6e5", 
      "itype": "docker", 
      "last_pull": 1536842228.15727, 
      "status": "READY", 
      "status_message": "", 
      "system": "fdata2-int.fidis", 
      "tag": [
        "scitas/alpine:latest"
      ], 
      "userACL": []
    },
[...]

Run the image

You can submit the following Slurm script with the sbatch command

#!/bin/bash -l
 
#SBATCH --nodes 1
#SBATCH --ntasks 1
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task 1
#SBATCH --mem 1024
 
srun shifter --image yourproject/alpine ls /etc

Interactive Shell (Bash)

To have an interactive shell within your image, simply use this:

$ srun --pty shifter --image yourproject/alpine bash

Using GPUs

On Deneb shifter runtime is installed on the GPU nodes. You need prior access to the GPUs nodes, see FAQ

[aubort@deneb1 ~]$ srun --gres gpu:1 --partition gpu --qos gpu shifter --image library/debian:stable-slim nvidia-smi -L
GPU 0: Tesla K40m (UUID: GPU-21730043-7144-85e7-d251-7834adb2d1ee)

[aubort@deneb1 ~]$ srun --gres gpu:1 --partition gpu --qos gpu shifter --image library/nvidia-cuda:9.1-runtime /home/aubort/gpu/cuda-samples/bin/x86_64/linux/release/simpleCUFFT 
[simpleCUFFT] is starting...
GPU Device 0: "Tesla K40m" with compute capability 3.5

Temporary buffer size 448 bytes
Transforming signal cufftExecC2C
Launching ComplexPointwiseMulAndScale<<< >>>
Transforming signal back cufftExecC2C

FEEDBACK is welcome as this feature is experimental.

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Running a Docker image with Shifter - Step by step

Interactive Shell (Bash)

Using GPUs

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