TL;DR: Complementary use cases involving virtual machines and containers do exist; examples involving VMware and Singularity are showcased here from SUG.

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

Virtual machines and containers need not be mutually exclusive. In this talk from Solutions Lab & HPC Solutions Architect Mohan Potheri of VMware, complementary use cases are emphasized:

VMware vSphere provides excellent capabilities for isolating workloads and sharing HW. Singularity containers are an excellent packaging mechanism for applications. We will look at how vSphere virtual machines and Singularity can be combined effectively for sharing GPUs in machine learning applications. We will discuss some experiments we have done in image processing and the 3X gains we saw in processing throughput by using this solution.

Entitled Combining VMware vSphere w/ Singularity Containers Brings Together the Best of Both Worlds, Mohan’s talk from SUG can be found below and here. Enjoy!