Singularity 3.5.0

THE CONTAINER PLATFORM FOR HPC, SUPERCOMPUTING, AND AI

TL/DR: Singularity 3.5.0 is now available [here](https://github.com/sylabs/singularity/releases/tag/v3.5.0)! It’s another exciting release that adds native support for ROCm and OpenCL compute on AMD Radeon ™ GPUs, simplified fakeroot configuration, a revised plugin interface and more!

With Singularity, you can containerize and package your applications, dependencies, environment, and/or data so you can use and distribute them anywhere with absolute trust, provenance, and reproducibility. With support for GPUs from both major vendors you can run CUDA and ROCm machine workloads with ease, or leverage OpenCL to accelerate your apps.

New features/functionalities

• New support for AMD GPUs via — rocm option added to bind ROCm devices and libraries into containers.
• Plugins can now modify Singularity behaviour with two mutators: CLI and Runtime.
• Introduced the config global command to edit singularity.conf settings from the CLI.
• Introduced the config fakeroot command to setup subuid and subgid mappings for — fakeroot from the Singularity CLI.

There are a few changed defaults, behaviours, and one deprecation, detailed in full at the release notes here: https://github.com/sylabs/singularity/releases/tag/v3.5.0

SINGULARITY

Singularity is a container runtime specifically designed for HPC and supercomputing use cases. Compatible with all other standard container formats (e.g. Docker, OCI), it is easy to install and works with all of your existing applications and HPC infrastructures, including resource managers, parallel file systems, MPI, GPUs, InfiniBand, and FPGAs. Singularity adds numerous benefits over other container runtimes including guarantees of trust of the contained software and data using cryptographically verifiable signatures to validate and provide provenance, as well as encryption for data protection when running in nonsecure environments and clouds.

Singularity was born out of the US Department of Energy National Laboratories, and has become the market leader in HPC, supercomputing, and AI ecosystems because it works so well. Due to many of its differentiating capabilities, Singularity is now gaining additional uptake with orchestration and the distant edge, as well as high security environments which need to have absolute trust of the software infrastructure.

FEATURES

Singularity Image Format (SIF™)

A secure, single-file, executable container format that is easily moved, shared, and archived.

Extreme Mobility

Define and bring your environment with you; you never need to install another program to a host, or worry about dependencies.

Compatibility

Compatible with Docker, OCI, Kubernetes, HashiCorp Nomad, Slurm, Univa, GPUs, InfiniBand, Lustre, GPFS, and so foth…

Security

Containers are cryptographically signed and verified, and executed as the calling user with privilege escalations being blocked from within the container.

Compliance

Because Singularity and our SIF format were designed with security in mind, they naturally fit into existing enforcement mechanisms like SELinux.

Open Source

Singularity is a BSD licensed software base with an active, friendly, and knowledgeable community of users and developers.

Enterprise Grade Support *

Organization specific dedicated support portal including access to Sylabs’ expert engineers.

Priority Access *

Advanced access to security updates, backported stable bug fixes, and new features.

* Feature available w/ SingularityPRO license only

Quote — “While the container runtime is a fundamental piece of the puzzle, it is only the first piece. Singularity Enterprise adds the additional pieces, solving problems around container management, trust, auditing, compliance, provenance, reproducibility, multi-site, and multi-cloud, as well as integration with CI/CD pipelines for DevOps and DevSecOps.”

Gregory Kurtzer, CEO, Sylabs, Inc.

THE CONTAINER OF CHOICE FOR PERFORMANCE CRITICAL APPLICATIONS

Singularity is currently used worldwide by academia, government agencies, military/defense, national labs, biotechnology, oil and gas, aerospace, EDA, as well as others. Please contact us via www.sylabs.io if you have any further questions, or wish to see a demonstration on how containers, Singularity, or Sylabs can help you.