The Linux Foundation said today it’s welcoming the rebranded Singularity project into its fold.

The Apptainer project, as it’s now known, is a container platform for high-performance computing workloads, designed to execute applications at bare-metal performance while ensuing they remain secure and portable.

With the Apptainer project, it’s possible to create and run containers that package up pieces of software in a way that’s portable and reproducible. It’s possible to build a container with Apptainer on a laptop and then run it on one of the largest HPC clusters in the world. Because the container is just a single file, it can run on any kind of computing infrastructure or platform.

Although there are many container platforms around, Apptainer is specially designed to run complex, microservices-based apps on HPC clusters. The project, first developed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has since become one of the most popular container platforms for those working with HPC clusters.

Apptainer is the preferred choice of HPC users for several reasons, notably its compatibility with Docker and Open Container Initiative standards and its support for a wide range of graphics processing units, field-programmable gate arrays, high-speed networks and file systems. It also offers verifiable reproducibility and security using cryptographic signatures, immutable container image formats and in-memory encryption.

The main advantage of Apptainer, according to users, is it allows HPC users to take advantage of optimizations in performance and parallelization for use cases such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and compute- and data-driven analytics.

“The Apptainer project has been an important step for containerization in high performance computing, driving an open-source platform that allows users to run complex applications on HPC clusters in a simple, portable and reproducible way,” said Brock Taylor, global HPC solutions director at Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

The Linux Foundation will now house the Apptainer project, where it will benefit from a proven governance structure and more visibility, hopefully growing its community of users and contributors.

“The Apptainer project is at a pivotal moment in its growth and evolution,” said Mike Dolan, senior vice president and general manager of projects at the Linux Foundation. “We look forward to supporting this community and enabling cross collaboration with even more open source developers and technologists to expand its ecosystem of contributors.”

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