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Ready Solutions Engineering Test Results

Performance of LS-DYNA on Singularity Containers

Authors: Nirmala Sundararajan, Joshua Weage, Nishanth Dandapanthula

HPC Innovation Lab, February 2018

Overview

We often look at containers today and see the potential of accelerated application delivery, scaling and portability and wonder how

we ever got by without them. This blog discusses the performance of LSTC LS-DYNA® within Singularity containers and on bare

metal. This blog is the third in the series of blogs regarding container technology by the HPC Engineering team. The first blog

Containers, Docker, Virtual Machines and HPC explored the use of containers. The second blog Containerizing HPC Applications

with Singularity provided an introduction to Singularity and discussed the challenges of using Singularity in HPC environments. This

third blog will focus on determining if there is a performance penalty while running the application (LS-DYNA) in a containerized

environment.

Containerizing LS-DYNA using Singularity

LS-DYNA is a general-purpose finite element (FEA) program capable of simulating complex real world problems. It is used in multiple

engineering disciplines such as automobile, aerospace, construction, military, manufacturing, and bioengineering

industries. An application specific container is a lightweight bundle of an application and its dependencies. The first step in creating

the container for LS-DYNA would be to have a minimal operating system (CentOS 7.3 in this case), basic tools to run the application

and support for InfiniBand within the container. With this, the container gets a runtime environment, system tools, and libraries. The

next step would be to install the application binaries within the container. The definition file used to create the LS-DYNA container is

given below. In this file, the bootstrap references the kind of base to be used and a number of options are available. “shub” pulls

images hosted on Singularity Hub, “docker” pulls images from Docker Hub and here yum is used to install Centos-7.

Definition File:

BootStrap: yum

OSVersion: 7

MirrorURL: http://vault.centos.org/7.3.1611/os/x86_64/

Include: yum

%post

# basic-tools and dev-tools

yum -y install evince wget vim zip unzip gzip tar perl

yum -y groupinstall "Development tools" --nogpgcheck

# InfiniBand drivers

yum -y --setopt=group_package_types=optional,default,mandatory groupinstall "InfiniBand

Support"

yum -y install rdma

yum -y install libibverbs-devel libsysfs-devel

yum -y install infinipath-psm

# Platform MPI

mkdir -p /home/inside/platform_mpi

Summary of content (5 pages)

PAGE 1
Ready Solutions Engineering Test Results Performance of LS-DYNA on Singularity Containers Authors: Nirmala Sundararajan, Joshua Weage, Nishanth Dandapanthula HPC Innovation Lab, February 2018 Overview We often look at containers today and see the potential of accelerated application delivery, scaling and portability and wonder how we ever got by without them. This blog discusses the performance of LSTC LS-DYNA® within Singularity containers and on bare metal.
PAGE 2
Ready Specs 2 chmod -R 777 /home/inside/platform_mpi cd /home/inside/platform_mpi /usr/bin/wget http://192.168.41.41/platform_mpi-09.1.0.1isv.x64.bin chmod 777 platform_mpi-09.1.0.1isv.x64.bin ./platform_mpi-09.1.0.1isv.x64.bin -installdir=/home/inside/platform_mpi -silent rm platform_mpi-09.1.0.1isv.x64.bin # Application mkdir -p /home/inside/lsdyna/code chmod -R 777 /home/inside/lsdyna/code cd /home/inside/lsdyna/code/usr/bin/wget http://192.168.41.
PAGE 3
Ready Specs 3 Figure1 shows that there is no perceptible performance loss while running LS-DYNA inside a containerized environment, both on a single node and across the four node cluster. The results for the bare-metal and container tests were within 2% of each other, which is within the expected run-to-run variability of the application itself. Figure 1. Performance inside singularity containers relative to bare metal on Skylake Cluster.
PAGE 4
Ready Specs 4 Figure 2 shows that there is no significant performance penalty while running LS- DYNA car2car inside Singularity containers on Broadwell except for a six node run, where the bare metal configuration is better by up to 5.5%. This performance delta might be tolerable for those use cases where the benefits of using containers outweigh absolute performance considerations. Figure 2. Performance inside singularity containers relative to bare metal on Broadwell Cluster.
PAGE 5
Ready Specs 5 Conclusion and Future Work In this blog, we discussed how the performance of LS-DYNA within singularity containers is by and large at par with running the application on bare metal servers. The performance difference while running LS-DYNA within Singularity containers remains within 2%, for the most part, with the maximum variation at 5.5%. The Dell EMC HPC team will focus on containerizing other applications, and this blog series will be continued.