Apptainer

Apptainer is a container platform. It allows you to create and run containers that package up pieces of software in a way that is portable and reproducible. You can build a container using Apptainer on your laptop, and then run it on many of the largest HPC clusters in the world, local university or company clusters, a single server, in the cloud, or on a workstation down the hall. Your container is a single file, and you don’t have to worry about how to install all the software you need on each different operating system.

Apptainer is a fork of singularity and thus, also supports singularity commands and workflows.

Apptainer on Anunna

A version of apptainer is available for each year-bucket. This means that every year a new version will be available.

One can load apptainer by running the following commands

module load 2023
module load Apptainer

Initial Setup

Apptainer will cache SIF container images generated from remote sources, and any OCI/docker layers used to create them. The cache is created at $HOME/.apptainer/cache by default. The location of the cache can be changed by setting the APPTAINER_CACHEDIR environment variable.

Since there is a limited amount of space available at $HOME, the Apptainer cache can quickly fill your quota. So it is recommended that you set the variable APPTAINER_CACHEDIR to a location ion lustre by edition your $HOME/.bash_aliases file. An example is provided at Aliases and local variables