Using LHCb Software with docker containers

Introduction

This is a short guide to use the LHCb software stack via docker containers. Docker is a lightweight virtualization environment with few to none overhead compared to bare metal execution of programs. More documentation about docker can be found here: https://www.docker.io/

Installation of docker

Instructions to install docker are available on the docker website: http://docs.docker.io/installation

Installation on SLC-6.5

Starting with SLC-6.5, docker is available from EPEL, so it is as simple as:

$ sudo yum -y install docker-io

Installation on other Linux distributions

Other Linux distributions are usually more up-to-date than what SLC provides. docker is thus already available on Ubuntus, Fedoras (>= 19) and others.

Refer to http://docs.docker.io/installation for the specifics.

Installation on MacOSX

Installation on OSX is a bit more convoluted: (as of 2014/06) you need to install a thin linux VM in which docker is installed. All these installations instructions are documented here: http://docs.docker.io/installation/mac/ and packaged into a single boot2docker binary which manages the lifetime of the linux-VM (including downloading it, installing it, configuring it, provisionning it and even ssh-ing into it)

Docker containers for HEP software

A number of containers for HEP has been pre-packaged and made available on the docker index: https://index.docker.io/

They are defined from this git repository: https://github.com/hepsw/docks

This repository (as of 2014/11) contains:

• hepsw/slc5-base a container with a bare and base installation of SLC-5.x
• hepsw/slc-base a container with a bare and base installation of SLC-6.x
• hepsw/slc-dev a container with a few programs and libraries on top of hepsw/slc-base to ease development
• hepsw/cc7-base a container with a bare and base installation of CERN Centos-7.x
• hepsw/cvmfs-base a container with CernVMFS installed and configured to mount the SFT installation from LCG, and the CernVM-prod one
• hepsw/cvmfs-atlas a container providing the ATLAS software via CernVMFS
• hepsw/cvmfs-cms a container providing the CMS software via CernVMFS
• hepsw/cvmfs-lhcb a container providing the LHCb software stack via CernVMFS
• hepsw/cvmfs-lsst a container providing the LSST software stack via CernVMFS
• hepsw/lhcb-base a container providing the tools to install LHCb software via RPMs
• hepsw/lhcb-gaudi a container providing a Gaudi installation (via the LHCb RPMs)
• hepsw/lhcb-davinci a container providing a DaVinci installation (via the LHCb RPMs)

Note that because hepsw/lhcb-gaudi and hepsw/lhcb-davinci are pretty huge container (resp. 4Gb and 10Gb), they haven't been uploaded on the docker index, you will need to build them locally.

Usage

Once docker has been properly installed, one can run e.g. the hepsw/cvmfs-lhcb:latest container like so:

$ docker run -h dev --privileged -i -t hepsw/cvmfs-lhcb:latest

This will download the hepsw/cvmfs-lhcb container from the index if this hasn't been already done, and then will drop you into a bash session with the proper LHCb environment configured (i.e. LbLogin ). Then any LHCb software provided by CernVMFs is available via SetupProject .

Each container provided by hepsw/docks has more documentation. See for example: https://github.com/hepsw/docks/tree/master/cvmfs-lhcb

Caveat emptor

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1111233

-- SebastienBinet - 05 Jun 2014