Perspectives and Experiences Supporting Containers for Research Computing at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

Containers are becoming essential to support the diversity of scientific computing workloads at academic computing centers. Here, we offer perspectives and experiences from the Texas Advanced Computing Center on: the installation, configuration, and support of select containerization platforms; incorporation of containers into the module system to improve their discoverability and usability; facilitation of advanced use cases including MPI containers, GPU containers, and support for multiple instruction set architectures; and finally instruction on best practices to end users through workshops and university courses. We will briefly discuss case studies that highlight the importance of supporting containers for research computing.