Test Setup

The examples and performance measurements reported in this document were carried out on Piz Daint, a hybrid Cray XC50/XC40 system in production at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Lugano, Switzerland. The system compute nodes are connected by the Cray Aries interconnect under a Dragonfly topology, notably providing users access to hybrid CPU-GPU nodes. Hybrid nodes are equipped with an Intel Xeon E5-2690v3 processor, 64 GB of RAM, and a single NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU with 16 GB of memory. The software environment on Piz Daint at the time of writing is the Cray Linux Environment 6.0.UP07 (CLE 6.0) using Environment Modules to provide access to compilers, tools, and applications. The default versions for the NVIDIA CUDA and MPI software stacks are, respectively, CUDA version 9.1, and Cray MPT version 7.7.2.

We install and configure Sarus on Piz Daint to use the native MPI and NVIDIA Container Runtime hooks, and to mount the container images from a Lustre parallel filesystem.

Performance measurements

In tests comparing native and container performance numbers, each data point presents the average and standard deviation of 50 runs, to produce statistically relevant results, unless otherwise noted. For a given application, all repetitions at each node count for both native and container execution were performed on the same allocated set of nodes.