This is a crosspost from URSSI Blog on Official Website of the US Research Software Sustaiability Institute, Recent content in URSSI Blog on Official Website of the US Research Software Sustaiability Institute. See the original post here.
Containers, such as Singularity and Docker, are an amazing advance in software sustainability. By allowing software developers to package not only application software but also other components of the software stack, including software dependencies, that the application needs, and with which the application is well tested, containers make the porting of applications to new platforms much more straightforward, convenient and efficient. In the large scale research computing world, containers are a miracle in the near-term, but a looming challenge in the medium- to long-term.