Presentation
SIGN IN TO VIEW THIS PRESENTATION Sign In
Lightweight Isolation for HPC Applications
DescriptionContainerization approaches based on namespaces offered by the Linux kernel have seen an increasing popularity in the HPC community both as a means to isolate applications and as a format to package and distribute them. However, their adoption and usage in HPC systems faces several challenges. These include difficulties in unprivileged running and building of scientific application container images directly on HPC resources, increasing heterogeneity of HPC architectures, and access to specialized networking libraries available only on HPC systems. These challenges of container-based HPC application development closely align with the several advantages that a new universal intermediate binary format called WebAssembly (Wasm) has to offer. These include a lightweight userspace isolation mechanism and portability across operating systems and processor architectures. This talk highlights the potential of using Wasm for packaging and distributing HPC applications and describes MPIWasm, a novel Wasm embedder that enables the high-performance execution of MPI-based HPC applications compiled to Wasm.
