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MPI jobs

Some are some additional requirements on the container images for MPI jobs:

  • mpirun should be in available inside the container and in the PATH
  • The ssh command should be installed inside the container

There is no reason to set an entrypoint as it will not be used. A command (and any required arguments) must be specified.

A simple minimal starting point for a Dockerfile for a CentOS 7 container image for OpenMPI is:

FROM centos:7
RUN yum -y install openssh-clients openmpi openmpi-devel

ENV PATH            /usr/lib64/openmpi/bin:${PATH}
ENV LD_LIBRARY_PATH /usr/lib64/openmpi/lib:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}

and for MPICH:

FROM centos:7
RUN yum -y install openssh-clients mpich mpich-devel

ENV PATH            /usr/lib64/mpich/bin:${PATH}
ENV LD_LIBRARY_PATH /usr/lib64/mpich/lib:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}

To create a container using IntelMPI an Intel compiler licence is required to build the application. This application can then be copied into a container image with the Intel Parallel Studio Runtime installed. For example, see here for information on installing the free Intel runtime in a CentOS environment.