Container Analysis Environments Workshop

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

Date/Location

• August 14-16, 2017
• National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
• 1205 W. Clark St, Urbana, IL

Goals

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

We are proposing the following themes:

• Users/researchers and what they are using container-based environments for (e.g., consistent environments, packaging applications, shifting computation around).
• Interactive vs non-interactive use cases including approaches to workflow management, orchestration, 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 environments.

Participating groups (tentative)

• SciServer
• Cyverse
• Whole Tale
• TERRA-REF
• Blue Waters
• Data Exploration Lab
• National Data Service

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
• Forum: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/container-analysis-environments
• Github: https://github.com/nds-org/container-analysis-workshop/

Schedule (tentative):

Monday August 14th

Tuesday August 15th

Breakout groups might include:

• Researcher use cases
• Interactive vs non-interactive use cases
• Moving analysis from to HPC environments
• Data/storage
• Security/permissions/licensing

Wednesday August 16th