Overview

SDSU’s Software Factory provides faculty and researchers with services and support for containerizing their instructional and research workloads to take advantage of High Performance Computing (HPC) resources. The Software Factory employs student assistants and trains them in DevOps practices like containerization, git source control, and continuous integration & continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. Software Factory students consult with faculty and researchers to understand their computing needs and data workflows in order to create software containers that enable their use cases.

Containerization

Containerization is the process of bundling a software application with all of its dependencies like the operating system (OS), file structures, configuration and other code libraries. Containers offer great benefits like isolated runtime environments, portability and consistency. For these reasons, among others, software containers have been widely adopted in industry, but are also gaining popularity in instructional and research settings.

Containers for Research

The National Research Platform is a shining example of containers enabling research workloads to run on HPC resources. The National Research Platform operates Nautilus, a nationally distributed kubernetes cluster with 308 nodes, 33,154 CPUs, and 1,321 GPUs (at the time of writing). SDSU is a contributor to Nautilus, with a total of 20 nodes running as part of the cluster, including the 15 Instructional Cluster nodes.

Next Steps

If you are interested in using containers to leverage the Instructional Cluster’s resources for instruction or research then continue on to the Getting Access page.

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