SingularityCE Community Update

Greetings community. We have had a few inquiries in recent weeks regarding the status of Singularity and the efforts of Sylabs.

Sylabs launched in 2017 as a small engineering team aimed at driving the Singularity open-source project forward, along with providing licensing and support for those who desired a professionally supported commercial version known as SingularityPRO. Since then we also developed and launched a free platform known as Sylabs Container Services for building, signing, and storing SIF containers (cloud.sylabs.io) using our on-premise deployable Singularity Enterprise toolset.

In 2020 Sylabs’ leadership, as good stewards to the open-source community, agreed to host the Singularity project under a third-party organization with the intent of broadening the technology and interests. After a period of time, Sylabs decided to fork the project into SingularityCE (read more here), maintaining our efforts on release management and development. Since then we have made 11 releases and have openly developed the SingularityCE roadmap (read more on GitHub), to which we welcome contributions. Please come and join our community calls to participate in the project’s development.

Sylabs’ efforts in leading the Singularity project continue to be beneficial to the community of users and customers, as the code has been pulled as the basis for other projects and commercial endeavors. We welcome these other efforts as they prove the value of the community’s work and the open-source software concept as a whole.

Sylabs will continue to fund, maintain and release new versions of SingularityCE and SingularityPRO, maintain compatibility between SingularityCE and SingularityPRO, support our customers, and continue to release new projects and tools for containerized workflows, all with compatibility and security as our goals. These efforts include working with other organizations to adopt and develop standards. For example, we recently assisted in the addition of SIF support in the containers/image library. We also contributed the Sylabs Library API specification to a community effort seeking to ensure it was supported in other runtimes.

The validity of Sylabs’ efforts is also evident in the Apptainer project, which incorporates the majority of features already present in SingularityCE 3.9. The community and our customers can be confident that Singularity continues to be an active, openly developed project, where CE and PRO combine to satisfy the needs of open-source and commercial users.

To close, we are extremely excited about the future of Singularity, so much so we are unable to contain our enthusiasm. Thank you.

Adam Hughes

CTO, Sylabs