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carpentries-incubator / docker-introduction

Reproducible Computational Environments using Containers
https://carpentries-incubator.github.io/docker-introduction/
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Configurability? #251

Open multimeric opened 1 month ago

multimeric commented 1 month ago

The introduction has:

configurability – containers can be sized to take advantage of more resources (memory, CPU, etc.) on large systems (clusters) or less, depending on the circumstances.

It's not clear to me what this is getting at. Does it imply that people build multiple versions of a container for different host resources? I haven't heard of this happening.

I don't typically list configurability as an advantage of containers, so I'm wondering if this point could be clarified.

aturner-epcc commented 1 month ago

I think you are right here, "configurability" is not quite the correct term. Rather, it is another aspect of "portability" - in this case not portability between systems with different OS, but portability from, for example, laptops to supercomputers. The same container can run, without modification, on large scale compute resources to take advantage of more powerful processors, larger memory resources and larger storage. Maybe two sub-bullets under portability would be the way to go here.

multimeric commented 1 month ago

Oh, so this point is to distinguish containers from virtual machines, which have fixed system resources?