Albany, CA — February 8, 2018 — Sylabs today entered the market to provide solutions and services based on Singularity, an open source container technology designed for high performance computing (HPC). Founded by the inventor and project lead for Singularity, Sylabs will license and support Singularity Pro, an enterprise version of the software, and introduce it to businesses in the enterprise and HPC commercial markets.
“Already the container platform of choice by academia and commercial HPC centers, Singularity’s features also make it the ideal container technology for artificial intelligence, machine / deep learning, compute-driven analytics, and data science — areas that we characterize as enterprise performance computingTM, or EPCTM,” said Gregory Kurtzer, founder and CEO of Sylabs. “These applications carry data-intensive workloads that demand HPC-like resources, and, as more companies leverage data to support their businesses, the need to properly containerize and support those workflows has grown substantially.”
While most container platforms are designed for microservices, Singularity was designed for HPC and scientific use cases. Founded in late 2015, Singularity is now in its 13th release (version 2.4.2) and runs over a million containers a day, via the Open Science Grid alone (a consortium that provides distributed computing resources for scientific research). According to a voluntary registry, it has an estimated user base of more than 25,000 spread around the world at major universities and government institutions including Stanford University, the National Institutes of Health, San Diego Supercomputer Center, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, as well as multiple US national labs.
The features that facilitated Singularity’s growth appeal to scientists as well as system providers. Some of these include:
• Security: