Image locations

Singularity image files can be large, and should preferably be built automatically (from a bootstrap file) and updated at regular intervals.

Due to this, we see no need to store Singularity images on /home (which is small, and backed up to tape).

Singularity has been configured to only allow using images that are stored on /proj, /software (NSC-provided images) and /scratch/local. If you have a good case for running images from /home, please let us know.

In most cases you should run your images directly from /proj (e.g singularity exec /proj/somewhere/myimage.img somecommand). If you will be executing Singularity many times from a single job, you might gain some performance by copying the image to /scratch/local at the beginning of the job.

Singularity is only available on compute nodes, not login nodes

For quick tests, you can e.g allocate a single core on a development node and run singularity there:

interactive -n1 -t 00:10:00 --reservation=now
singularity ...

or skip interactive and use srun:

srun --pty -n1 -t 00:10:00 --reservation=now singularity ...

PID name space disabled

If you have a need for this feature, let us know.