Singularity is now Apptainer!


Apptainer

THE CONTAINER SYSTEM FOR SECURE HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING

Apptainer/Singularity is the most widely used container system for HPC. It is designed to execute applications at bare-metal performance while being secure, portable, and 100% reproducible. Apptainer is an open-source project with a friendly community of developers and users. The user base continues to expand, with Apptainer/Singularity now used across industry and academia in many areas of work.

Overview

SECURE

Create a new container including any application(s) or use an existing OCI/Docker container and secure it cryptographically to guarantee its contents.

DISTRIBUTE

Securely archive, distribute, share containers with others via container registeries, object stores, HTTP services, or shared storage.

RUN

Run workloads with the absolute guarantee of where the container came from and that it has not been tampered with or changed.

Singularity video tutorial, recorded by Ian Kaneshiro @ CIQ.

Features

Absolute Trust and Security

Apptainer/Singularity is the only container system that supports public/private key signing, providing trust and guarantees of immutability.

Compatibility

Apptainer is 100% Docker and OCI (Open Containers Initiative) compatible (but easier to use).

Encrypted

Apptainer can encrypt containers and integrates with Vault and other secret management platforms to secure applications, models, and data.

Absolute Portability

The single-file SIF container format allows you to reproducibly build, share, and archive your workload from workstations, to HPC, to the edge.

Secure

Apptainer runs "rootless" by default. It allows unprivileged users to leverage containers and prohibits privilege escalation within the container; users are the same inside and outside the container.

Integration over isolation

Apptainer's security architecture allows you to securely leverage GPUs, FPGAs, high-speed networks, and filesystems.

Easy to Use

Apptainer intuitively allows non-privileged users to run any containerized application.

Community

Apptainer/Singularity is by far the most utilized container system for performance-intensive computing!

Support

Commercial support for Apptainer is officially provided by CIQ.