HPSF Conference 2025

Managing software on supercomputers is challenging due to diverse architectures, dependency complexities, and security constraints. Traditional tools like Spack help with software compilation, but they lack portability and require system-specific configurations. Apptainer (formerly Singularity) solves these issues by enabling secure, portable, and reproducible containerized environments tailored for HPC. Unlike Docker, Apptainer runs without root access, ensuring security and compliance in multi-user clusters. It supports MPI, GPUs, and Slurm, allowing high-performance workloads to run seamlessly across systems. By integrating Apptainer into NSM supercomputers, researchers benefit from faster deployments, reproducible results, and reduced administrative overhead. This session explores Apptainer’s role in transforming HPC workflows, its advantages over traditional software management, and best practices for adopting containers in large-scale computing environments.