Installing Apptainer#

Virtual accelerators are deployed as Apptainer containers.

Instructions for how to install and run Apptainer on different OS are available here.

Linux#

Try to first install using the pre-build packages for your Linux distribution.

If that doesn’t work (for example if it requires root permissions which you don’t have), do an unprivileged installation instead.

You should then be able to run Apptainer in a terminal.

You can then start the Ubuntu app which opens a Linux terminal where you can run Apptainer.

For Mac you need to use Lima. Instructions are available at https://apptainer.org/docs/admin/main/installation.html#mac but more detailed instructions are below since some additonal steps are required.

For ARM-based MacOS server:

brew install qemu lima

limactl start –rosetta –vm-type=vz –network=vzNAT template://apptainer

For Intel-based MacOS server:

brew install lima

limactl start –vm-type=vz –network=vzNAT template://apptainer

To run a container you need to first do the following command before you can run Apptainer:

limactl shell apptainer

To stop the container you need to do:

limactl stop apptainer

limactl delete apptainer