JINR Container Distribution Service

Abstract

Container virtualization technology is gaining more and more traction both in industry and science. The HEP community is also showing significant interest in adopting container technologies for software distribution. Encapsulating software inside containers helps scientists create portable and reproducible research environments. However, running containerized workloads at scale via distributed computing infrastructures has some challenges, one of which is efficient container delivery. In a typical scenario thousands of copies of user containers need to be delivered to the worker nodes simultaneously, posing an excessive load on the container registry. The paper describes how a container registry able to cope with such high loads can be built, reviews existing major public services based on CVMFS and shows an example of such a service implementation at JINR using GitLab.