Configuring containers with LSF

A container is a lightweight operating system level virtualization that is based on Linux control groups (cgroups) and namespace. A container runs efficiently and starts based on a predefined image. You can pack an application and release it as a container image. A container is portable and can run on any Linux distribution for any image. LSF supports Docker, Singularity, and Shifter container runtimes.

When used with LSF GPU scheduling, LSF can use the nvidia-docker runtime to make allocated GPUs work in the container for application accelerations. LSF starts a job-based container for the job, and the life cycle of the container is the same as the job's. For parallel jobs, LSF starts a set of containers for a job. When the job is finished, LSF destroys all containers.

LSF configures container runtime control in the application profile. It is the LSF administrator's responsibility to configure container runtime in the application profile, and end users do not need to consider which containers are used for their jobs. End users submit their jobs to the application profile and LSF automatically manages the container runtime control.