TL;DR: PMIx is poised to bridge the container boundary; learn about it here from project founder and leader Ralph Castain of Intel via his SUG talk.
SUG Series Introduction
The inaugural meeting of the Singularity User Group (SUG) was held March 12-13, 2019, at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). The event attracted diverse representation from the international advanced computing community as conveyed through the post-event press release issued jointly by SDSC and Sylabs.
Over the course of the two-day event, over 20 talks were presented by members of the Singularity user, developer, and provider community. Because SUG generated a significant amount of interest, even from those who were unable to attend, we are sharing online each of the talks presented.
SUG Talk Introduction
Awareness regarding PMIx was extremely uneven amongst SUG participants. As a consequence, Intel Principal Engineer Ralph Castain literally and figuratively built bridges through his contributed talk entitled PMIx: Bridging the Container Boundary:
High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications have historically executed in static resource allocations, using programming models that ran independently from the resident system management stack (SMS). The Process Management Interface – Exascale (PMIx) community is committed to establishing scalable workflow orchestration by defining an abstract set of interfaces by which not only applications and tools can interact with the resident SMS, but also the various SMS components can interact with each other. PMIx has been widely adopted by both HPC programming libraries (e.g., MPI, OpenSHMEM) and SMS vendors (e.g., Slurm, JSM, PBSPro), and work is underway to extend support into non-HPC areas (e.g., Spark, Kubernetes). This presentation will provide an overview of the project and how it impacts the container community, and introduce a new community project (Epyx) specifically tailored to supporting containers in PMIx-enabled environments.
Ralph’s talk from SUG can be found below and here. Enjoy!
