E7.1 Containerized E3SM Workflows

Abstract

With recent developments in operating systems, containers allow a process and all of its dependencies to be isolated. This makes running software across many diverse environments more straightforward, reducing the need for many different dependencies for various software to work together in harmony. The goal of this work is to introduce container technology into E3SM workflows starting with diagnostics and analysis.

There are various container runtime environments such as Docker, Shifter, Singularity, and udocker, all present on different machines and which provide some degree of interoperability. We present an overview of containers technology, detailing advantages of containerizing software. The process of containerizing a software package, e3ms_diags, across these diverse container runtime environments is also covered.