ALBANY, Calif., April 23, 2019 — Sylabs, a leading provider of container runtime solutions for Trusted Enterprise Performance Computing (TEPC), announced today the release of SingularityPRO 3.1. This is the first offering based upon the version 3 release series of the popular open source Singularity container platform — an offering that signals a watershed moment for enterprise customers everywhere.

Founded at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to provide containerization for some of the largest and most secure systems in the world, Singularity is a widely adopted open source container runtime, designed for computational workloads. Focused on performance, while implementing a unique security model that mitigates privilege escalation risks, Singularity provides a platform to capture a complete application environment into a single Singularity Image Format (SIF) file.

SingularityPRO 3.1 is the latest enterprise-grade offering developed by Sylabs. Designed to be sustainable over the long term to align with the business-driven needs of enterprise customers to containerize their compute-driven workloads, it has the highest assurance of quality and stability, as a result of Sylabs’ automated and comprehensive end-to-end testing. Enterprise customers receive top-tier level support, as security vulnerabilities and bug fixes are addressed on an ongoing basis, so that their initial investment in SingularityPRO is future-proofed over the product’s entire life cycle. Customers can also access cloud versions of Sylabs’ Singularity Container Services.

Fully compliant with standards established by the Open Containers Initiative (OCI), SingularityPRO 3.1 is compatible with all workload managers as well as integrated with orchestration systems such as Kubernetes and HashiCorp Nomad.

“As an early adopter of Singularity, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) has been collaborating with Sylabs and the development team for several years,” said Mahidhar Tatineni, computational scientist at SDSC, who also manages the SDSC User Services Group. “The scientific community is developing software at an unprecedented rate, and our collaboration with Sylabs helps us more quickly respond to the evolving needs of our users.”

“The availability of ready-to-use binary distributions is the primary benefit we’ve derived from SingularityPRO,” said Dr. Oleksandr Moskalenko, research computing facilitator at the University of Florida’s information technology division (UFIT). “This has made it much easier for our systems configuration staff to provision SingularityPRO onto servers and compute nodes. Enhancements relating to SIF in particular, and feature/functionality parity with the latest community editions, are other reasons we’re anticipating with interest the availability of SingularityPRO 3.1.”

“When we first adopted Singularity a few years ago, the driving case was to support TensorFlow on our cluster with GPUs and an old operating system. It was relatively easy to build a container with the right libraries and environment using Singularity,” said Chris Reidy, principal HPC systems administrator Research Technologies at the University of Arizona. “The use cases today are increasing even as we update our clusters, so Singularity is more than a transient solution.”

“SingularityPRO 3.1 is the most highly anticipated release of our enterprise software ever,” said Gregory Kurtzer, founder and CEO of Sylabs. “With this release, we’re rapidly advancing container science, making it a truly opportune time for those seeking to containerize the most demanding enterprise performance computing workloads in the most trusted way. The effort we’re expending upon SingularityPRO 3.1 is also being validated, as our customer base continues to embrace mainstay representation from education and government, as well as uptake from organizations within the private sector.”

SingularityPRO is immediately available directly from Sylabs, its partners, and from various cloud-based marketplaces.

About Sylabs

Sylabs is changing how people use containers. It was founded with the mission to advocate for open source technologies and provide container solutions and services for secure, compute-driven use cases that take enterprise AI and HPC commercial markets to the next level. The company is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area and is backed by RStor, the only multi-cloud platform that enables organizations to compute, connect, and operate above the cloud.

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Source: Sylabs