Managing software packages in a scientific computing environment is a challenging task, especially in the case of heterogeneous systems. It is error prone when installing and updating software packages in a sophisticated computing environment. Testing and performance evaluation in an on-the-fly manner is also a troublesome task for a production system. In this paper, we discuss a package management scheme based on containers. The newly developed method can ease the maintenance complexity and reduce human mistakes. We can benefit from the self-containing and isolation features of container technologies for maintaining the software packages among intricately connected clusters. By deploying the SuperComputing application Strore (SCStore) over the WAN connected world-largest clusters, it proved that it can greatly reduce the effort for maintaining the consistency of software environment and bring benefit to achieve automation.
Publications
Year

Tsinghua Science and Technology 2017, 22(6): 675-681
Published: 14 December 2017
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