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

A few travel items:

• Willard Airport https://www.flycmi.com/
  
• Illini Shuttle http://www.illinishuttle.com/
• Peoria Charter https://peoriacharter.com/

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 (tentative)

• SciServer
• Cyverse
• Whole Tale
• TERRA-REF
• Blue Waters
• Data Exploration Lab
• NDS Labs Workbench

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/

Schedule (tentative):

Below is the tentative 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:

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.