BYOE (Bring-Your-Own-Environment) with Singularity and Anaconda

"Singularity" is an emerging technology widely adopted by high performance computing center in the world. It is a software container platform that allows user to run applications in a Linux environment of their choice. It encapsulates the operating system and the application stack into a single image file. One can modify, copy and transfer the image to any system that has Singularity installed and run it as a user application by integrating the system native resources such as infiniband network, GPU/accelerators, and resource manager with the container. Singularity literally enables BYOE (Bring-Your-Own-Environment) computing in the multi-tenant and shared HPC cluster.

ITSC has already installed the Singularity environment in the HPC2 cluster and prepared a container image to run TensorFlow. You may refer to the following guide for the setup https://itsc.ust.hk/services/academic-teaching-support/high-performance-computing/hpc2-cluster/software/singularity

Anaconda is another useful component in the HPC environment. Anaconda is a package manager, environment manager and Python distribution with a collection of over 720 open source packages with free community support. With Anaconda, you can query, install and update python packages in your own environment easily.

More information about Anaconda can be found here: https://itsc.ust.hk/services/academic-teaching-support/high-performance-computing/hpc2-cluster/software/anaconda

ITSC will continue to work with the HPC user community to further improve the service. Please contact us at hpcadmin@ust.hk if you have any suggestions and comments about the HPC platform.