Container Analysis Environments Workshop

Information about the 2017 Container Analysis Environments Workshop hosted by the Data Exploration Lab and NDS.

Date/Location

• August 14-16, 2017
• National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
• 1205 W. Clark St, Urbana, IL, Room 1040
• Directions from Hampton Inn: https://goo.gl/maps/V23D3tCRYa92

Goals

The idea of this workshop emerged from the 7th NDS Workshop as an opportunity for groups leveraging container-based technologies in research computing environments to build community, share information and address common challenges. 

We are proposing the following themes (please feel free to suggest other topics):

• Users/researchers and why they are using container-based environments (e.g., consistent environments, packaging applications, shifting computation around)
• Interactive vs non-interactive use cases including approaches to workflow management, orchestration, scalability, and moving analysis to HPC environments
• Data/storage focusing on models for managing and exposing data to containers
• Security/permissions/licensing
• Challenges/what new use cases are we seeing?

The goal will be to approach this from both user and system perspectives, focusing on the science/research cases and how technical solutions are addressing these needs.

Workshop report

• One output of the workshop will be a report summarizing common use cases, best practices, and challenges supporting container-based analysis and computing environments.

Participating groups 

See Container Analysis Environments Participants.

Format:

The format of the workshop will be presentations mixed with discussions, working groups, or deep-dive presentations. The working groups will be self-organized, based on the goals and needs of participants. Each person/group will present for ~20 minutes. Participants will be from a variety of backgrounds. Presentations should cover supported science cases, overall systems architecture, and any challenges/new directions related to supporting container-based analysis and computing environments.

Communication:

• Slack: https://nationaldataservice.slack.com/  #container-workshop channel
• Forum: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/container-analysis-environments
• Github: https://github.com/nds-org/container-analysis-workshop/
• Wiki: https://nationaldataservice.atlassian.net/
• Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B8i3lba1_nLwVmt4LUxuaTV6NTQ?usp=sharing

Schedule:

Below is the latest workshop schedule.  Presentations and times are subject to change. Please contact us with any dietary restrictions.

Monday August 14th (tentative)

The first day we will focus on participant presentations with significant Q&A and discussion time.  Topics that emerge from the presentations will be considered for breakout/deep-dive discussions on Tuesday and Wednesday. 

Tuesday August 15th

Tentative: Based on discussions from Monday, we will organize breakout/deep-dive discussions for topics of interest (feel free to suggest).  Additional presentations may be scheduled, depending on participation:

Topics from discussion:

• Integration with HPC environments
• Interactive anlaysis environments
• Integration with workflow systems (not enough expertise to discuss)
• Shared storage across containers
• Managing images/archiving preservation

Wednesday August 16th

Tentative: We will use the morning to conclude any break-out work and to consolidate group output (presentations, documents, etc) for the workshop report.

Where to eat

A few recommendations for places to eat in Champaign/Urbana:

• Golden Harbor (Chinese)
• Black Dog (BBQ)
• Big Grove 
• Bread Company
• Seven Saints (Bar w/ food)
• Papa Del's (deep-dish pizza)