Singularity is no longer officially supported in its original form and has forked into a version via Syslabs (with the same name, i.e., “Singularity”) and Apptainer.
We have only Apptainer currently supported on the CHPC; see the Apptainer documentation for more info. For users who are familiar with Singularity, Apptainer is (more-or-less) the same. For most cases, you can simply replace “singularity” with “apptainer” to run singularity commands, and “singularity” is currently aliased to “apptainer”.
We support the system installation at /usr/bin/apptainer.
We also maintain a basic legacy support for the module tool, and both singularity and apptainer 1.4.0 refer to the system installation:
[me@login01 ~]$ module avail apptainer
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /opt/modulefiles -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
apptainer/1.4.0
The complete user guide be found at https://apptainer.org/docs/user/latest/.
Check out Working with Containers for more information.
Note: when building Apptainer container images, avoid using either home or scratch directory as the temporary directory, for instance, you may set the temporary directory to /tmp by specifying the option –tmpdir /tmp for the Apptainer command. Otherwise, you may encounter the following error:
FATAL: While performing build: packer failed to pack: while unpacking tmpfs: error unpacking rootfs: unpack layer: unpack entry: usr/share/terminfo/c/cons25: link: unpriv.link: unpriv.wrap target: operation not permitted