Containerization and Virtualization Summary Report

Over the last decade, the tremendous growth in data-enabled science and engineering, coupled with the push for exascale computing, are leading researchers to adopt new large-scale computing practices. These include traditional high-performance computing (HPC) and high-throughput computing (HTC) as well as emergent commercial and public sector cloud computing services. Even though computational research communities are migrating toward these technologies at various times and differing rates, the result is the same, widespread adoption of innovative and individualized approaches and platforms. This move away from analytics and tools being developed on standardized platforms with standard libraries is a challenge for HPC and HTC facilities where improved networks have made the live analysis of streaming data possible, but the need for compatibility between platforms has increased.