Skip to content

Why Singularity?

  • A secure, single-file based container format
    SIF™ (Singularity Image Format) is a single executable file based container image, cryptographically signed, auditable, secure, and easy to move using existing data mobility paradigms.
  • Support for data-intensive workloads
    The elegance of Singularity's architecture bridges the gap between HPC and AI, deep learning/machine learning, and predictive analytics.
  • Extreme mobility
    Use standard file and object copy tools to transport, share, or distribute a Singularity container. Any endpoint with Singularity installed can run the container.
  • Compatibility
    Designed to support complex architectures and workflows, Singularity is easily adaptable to almost any environment.
  • More ...
  • More from the "User documentation" ...

What is Singularity.

Singularity is not the only OS level virtualization implementation arround. One of the main uses of Singularity is to bring containers and reproducibility to scientific computing and the high-performance computing (HPC) world1.

More on Wikipedia

What is Singularity - an alternative view.

Singularity runs in the user space i.e. which allows you to run Singularity containers in systems where you have only user rights - common situation on public and government computer resources.

Since your home folder gets automatically mounted/exposed to your virtual environment you can look at it as an alternative way to expose your data to different complete setups with pre-installed and configured software.

Purpose

This workshop material aims to demonstrate and exercise some commonly used features by simple interactive tutorials. Thus, this is not complete manual or documentation for Singularity.

The "User documentation" is an excellent reference source with basic examples in well-ordered fashion and always up to date.

  1. Kurtzer, Gregory M; Sochat, Vanessa; Bauer, Michael W (2017). "Singularity: Scientific containers for mobility of compute". PLOS ONE. 12 (5): e0177459. Bibcode:2017PLoSO..1277459K. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0177459. PMC 5426675. PMID 28494014 ↩