Sunday, July 23, 2023

Symposium on Challenges and Opportunities in Containerization of Software and Data Products

at Portland, Oregon

 Venue: Oregon Convention Center


This event is co-located with the PEARC23 conference. No fee is required for attending this event on July 23, 2023. However, all potential participants should RSVP for the event by July 17, 2023, 5:00 PM CST through the form provided below.

Duration: 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM 

 

The "containerization" of software and data products future-proofs them, helps in their long-term preservation, makes them portable across different hardware platforms, ensures reproducible results, and makes them convenient to disseminate. Docker and Singularity are two popular software technologies for containerizing scientific applications and are widely supported on different hardware platforms.


This symposium will be a summit of talks and activities on challenges and opportunities related to containerization using Docker and Singularity. Some of the topics that are in the scope of this symposium include: (1) processes for developing optimized, secure, and trustworthy, Docker/Singularity images, (2) test cases that can benefit from containerization, (3) using containers on HPC and cloud computing platforms, (4) best practices in containerization, (5) selecting licenses for Docker/Singularity images, (6) tools and techniques for facilitating the containerization and dissemination of software and data products, and (7) adoption and learning curve related to containerization.


This symposium will bring together (1) the community interested in containerizing their software and data products, and (2) the service providers who can help in meeting such needs. The symposium is co-located with PEARC23 and the attendees interested in coming to only this event - on July 23, 2023 - do not need to pay any fee. However, all attendees are requested to RSVP for the event by July 17, 2023, 5:00 PM CST to help us with our preparations. 


Travel support is available for up to two early career professionals/students who would benefit from attending the symposium. Those interested in requesting the travel support, should submit the RSVP form linked on this website by June 7, 2023, 5:00 PM CST and should respond to all the travel support related questions on the form.


The participants selected to receive travel support will be notified by June 15, 2023 and their travel arrangements would need to be finalized at the earliest after that.

 

Short-Talks

There will be four talks of maximum 20 minutes each on the topics in the scope of the symposium.

Working Groups 

Attendees will work in small groups to discuss test cases, challenges, and needs in the context of containerization. The  test cases will be documented in a GitHub repository and where applicable, the containerized products will be delivered after the event.

Presentations

Each working group will present the summary of their discussions and a plan for the next steps. Discussions at the workshop will be compiled in a report that will be made publicly accessible.

 The user community attending the event is encouraged to share their test cases, needs, and challenges around containerization. The service providers attending the event are encouraged to share the information about their tools and efforts towards addressing the needs of the community.

 

The Speakers

Frank Lee,  IBM


Frank Lee is a Director & Distinguished Engineer at IBM. He has created reference architectures, developed integrated solutions, and contributed to product development in the fields of high-performance computing, software defined infrastructure, and cloud-to-edge computing. His High Performance for Data & AI (HPDA) reference architecture for Healthcare and Life Sciences has been adopted by dozens of clients and partners worldwide. His latest work around Unified Data Foundation (UDF) provides a scalable, resilient and pervasive infrastructure across hybrid cloud platforms edge-core-cloud.

Frank is also a thought leader and innovator in the field of metadata, workflow and provenance for large-scale unstructured data management with patents, paper, books and presentations in major industry events and conferences.

With a Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics from Washington University where he participated in the ground-breaking Human Genome Project, Frank is a well-recognized subject matter expert on genomics and bioinformatics.  Frank also represents IBM in a growing number of genomics and precision medicine projects worldwide.

Tanu Malik, Depaul University


Tanu Malik is an Associate Professor at the School of Computing, DePaul University. At DePaul, she directs the DICE Lab. Her research interests are in data provenance, database systems, and scientific computing. Tanu received the 2019 NSF CAREER award for her work on computational reproducibility.
She is also the 2019 DoE Better Scientific Software Fellow. The National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics Space Agency, and the Bloomberg Foundation have funded her research. Tanu received her PhD in Computer Science from the Johns Hopkins University and she previously worked as a Research Associate Scientist at The University of Chicago.


Joe Latessa, Wayne State University

Joseph Latessa is engaged in developing software for the NSF-funded high-energy physics JETSCAPE/XSCAPE project.  As a part of the JETSCAPE Collaboration, he has worked to containerize JETSCAPE’s software and development environment. His research interests include high-performance computing and computer science education. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in computer science at Wayne State University.

Ritu Arora, Wayne State University

Ritu Arora is a faculty member in the Computer Science department at Wayne State University and is the founder of Venra Tech Inc., a company that provides solutions for advanced computing, data management, visualization, AI, and IT infrastructure development. Prior to joining Wayne State University, Ritu worked at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) as the Assistant Vice President of Research Computing, and before that, she served as a Research Scientist at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at UT Austin. Ritu obtained her Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2010.

Let us know if you'll be attending!

 For any question about this event, please feel free to contact Ritu Arora at ritu@wayne.edu .