SingularityCE

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What is SingularityCE?

SingularityCE is the Community Edition of Singularity, an open source container platform designed to be simple, fast, and secure. Many container platforms are available, but SingularityCE is designed for ease-of-use on shared systems and in high performance computing (HPC) environments. It features:

An immutable single-file container image format, supporting cryptographic signatures and encryption.
Integration over isolation by default. Easily make use of GPUs, high speed networks, parallel filesystems on a cluster or server.
Mobility of compute. The single file SIF container format is easy to transport and share.
A simple, effective security model. You are the same user inside a container as outside, and cannot gain additional privilege on the host system by default.

SingularityCE is open source software, distributed under the BSD License.

Getting Started with SingularityCE

To install SingularityCE from source, see the installation instructions. For other installation options, see our guide.

System administrators can learn how to configure SingularityCE, and get an overview of its architecture and security features in the administrator guide.

For users, see the user guide for details on how to run and build containers with SingularityCE.

Contributing to SingularityCE

Community contributions are always greatly appreciated. To start developing SingularityCE, check out the guidelines for contributing.

Please note we have a code of conduct. Please follow it in all your interactions with the project members and users.

Our roadmap, other documents, and user/developer meeting information can be found in GitHub Discussions.

We also welcome contributions to our user guide and admin guide.

Support

To get help with SingularityCE, check out the community spaces detailed at our Community Portal.

See also our Support Guidelines for further information about the best place, and how, to raise different kinds of issues and questions.

For additional support, contact Sylabs to receive more information.

Community Calls & Roadmap

We maintain our roadmap on GitHub Discussions, so that it’s easy to collect ideas for new features, and discuss which should be prioritized for the next release.

Regular community calls are held for the project, on the first Thursday of each month, via Zoom. The agenda for each call includes a demonstration of new features, or a project / workflow related to SingularityCE. This is followed by development updates & discussion, before open questions. Meeting details are posted in Github Discussions, and recordings made available at the Sylabs YouTube Channel.

If you work on a project related to Singularity, or use Singularity in an interesting workflow, let us know if you’d like to present to the community!

Go Version Compatibility

SingularityCE aims to maintain support for the two most recent stable versions of Go. This corresponds to the Go Release Maintenance Policy and Security Policy, ensuring critical bug fixes and security patches are available for all supported language versions.

Citing Singularity

The SingularityCE software may be cited using our Zenodo DOI 10.5281/zenodo.5570766:

SingularityCE Developers (2021) SingularityCE. 10.5281/zenodo.5570766 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5570766

This is an ‘all versions’ DOI for referencing SingularityCE in a manner that is not version-specific. You may wish to reference the particular version of SingularityCE used in your work. Zenodo creates a unique DOI for each release, and these can be found in the ‘Versions’ sidebar on the Zenodo record page.

Please also consider citing the original publication describing Singularity:

Kurtzer GM, Sochat V, Bauer MW (2017) Singularity: Scientific containers for mobility of compute. PLoS ONE 12(5): e0177459. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0177459

License

Unless otherwise noted, this project is licensed under a 3-clause BSD license found in the license file.