Sug Talk: Mellanox’s Parav Pandit On Best Practices For Containerizing Infiniband

TL;DR: Integration over isolation in Singularity ensures ease of access to specialized interconnect fabrics such as InfiniBand; here, industry leader Mellanox shares best practices.

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

Singularity emphasizes integration over isolation. Thus, accessing the interconnect fabrics that enable distributed computing through message passing is a capability delivered seamlessly via Singularity containers. In this SUG talk from Mellanox, a leading provider of InfiniBand solutions, Staff Engineer Parav Pandit shares best practices in the context of containerization via Singularity. The abstract for Parav’s contributed talk entitled Best Practices for Containerizing InfiniBand is as follows:

InfiniBand is the leading interconnect accelerating HPC applications, delivers high bandwidth, low latency, RDMA and In-Network Computing advantages. The InfiniBand technology enables to bypasses the kernel, and offloads the network transport to the Host Channel Adapter (HCA). In the case of non-RDMA networks, when using containerized application, only system call level ABI compatibility needed between the Linux kernel and the container. However, a containerized application which uses RDMA, needs to ensure ABI compatibility between (a) application and kernel, (b) kernel and HCA and (c) user space stack and HCA. This talk highlights some of the best practices for InfiniBand in such environment. In this talk we will also discuss how to containerize InfiniBand for Singularity platform in an easy manner.

Parav’s talk from SUG can be found below and here. Enjoy!