Container Hackathon for Modellers

Atmosphere and ocean models are characterised by complex dependencies, external configurations, and performance requirements. The objective to containerise such software stacks helps to provide a consistent environment to ensure security, portability and performance. Since the container is built only once, but then can be deployed on multiple platforms, productivity is increased. ETH Zurich provides subsequent Docker/Shifter support for the teams to complete the containerisation of their models.

Aim of the hackathon is to create containerised versions of Earth system models (e.g. COSMO, ICON, Nemo, OpenIFS, EC-Earth) using a Docker-compatible technology such as Shifter and to identify representative test cases. In order to help evaluating performance when containers are used and which adaptations are necessary, the ported Earth system models from the hackathon is going to be deployed on CSCS supercomputer (Piz Daint) using an HPC-oriented container runtime. The Docker-compatible format of runtime will ease container portability across different systems and help collecting the performance figures from the representative test case.

Format
3-day workshop

Audience
Open to all modelling teams involved in ESiWACE2 but we are open also for groups outside the ESiWACE2 community.

Location
The hackathon would take place at CSCS Lugano:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Swiss+National+Supercomputing+Centre+-+CSCS/@46.0242897,8.9578863,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x4784326c6b3ff125:0x6d1cbcad483afe30!8m2!3d46.024286!4d8.960075

Summary
A summary of the made experiences can be found at Zenodo https://zenodo.org/record/3685888#.XxlPbC1h06g and the event repository is available at github https://github.com/eth-cscs/ContainerHackathon.