Hello,
So for a few months I have been using CentOS 7 to run my hpc applications as a learning exercise due to covid (learning new software and validating many cases). I wanted to use CentOS 7 as a daily OS but I realized it might be harder because I needed to have work arounds for some of the OpenSource applications that require newer dependencies. I found out about docker/moby/podman and decided to use it for applications i need centos for.
And here we are, native performance of all my commercial software running in a systemd enabled CentOS7 environment running on the latest Fedora 33 distro.
Has anyone here used containers for something similar?
Stay Safe and Have a great day!
Well what you are doing is not that uncommon in enterprise. Perhaps with better planning 
Containers were developed not for security through isolation, but for the advantages of Compartmentalization. It is a big word for thinking in small boxes. The final outcome is what you might know as Kubernetes.
But to be a bit strict: Containers are for building upon a layer, not for digging under it. VM is much better for that. Going from Fedora to Centos is digging down. Like hooking a Ferrari with a camping gear.
Yeah singulairty containers for these type of hpc applications is big, unfortunately idk how to use singulairty. This method isn’t what’s normal, but I get native performance for the few commercial supported apps that fail to run on newer distros with newer kernal. A vm would have noticible overhead for when I actually run the simulation as it hits both cpu and memory hard.
On my local computer, I run/test most of my development either in docker containers & docker swarms or virtual machines. It depends on the task & project, though. I much prefer containers, but sometimes you need to fiddle with the OS too much; that’s when VMs become very handy.
My favourite thing about docker is that I can run multiple databases without much overhead on a single machine. I can also install them and modify the containers on a whim, it’s a huge advantage to not have to install each stupid service manually.
The only limit I have is the 64 gigs of ram on my local machine. And with the R9 5900X’s 24 threads these things are running at impressive warp 9.
1 Like
