User documentation for the PLEIADES cluster at the University of Wuppertal
Apptainer (recently Singularity), is the most common containerization technology on HPC systems.
The container management program singularity is installed on the system. If you need a different compiler version in order to be able to compile your program, you can download them as an image from the docker hub by using the command
singularity pull docker://gcc:<version>
This will create a .sif file in your current directory. You can then use the command
singularity shell <your-.sif-file>
to get an interactive shell using the specified compiler version. Compile your program in the way you need to and log out of the container in the usual way.
Singularity can be used to execute mpi-processes in a container. This can be done by using
mpirun singularity exec <your-.sif-file> </path/to/program>
Note the order of calling mpi and singularity. Singularity will connect the mpi runtime environment on the host system with the mpi processes in the container.