Container technologies enable encapsulation of the runtime environments within an image based limited operating system virtualization. Different versions and distributions of Linux can be made available within existing environment. Complete workloads can be encapsulated in a single file.
There are number of container technologies in use today. Docker, Shifter and Singularity are most common ones. Singularity was adopted on SCC, because of it’s secure design, wide adoption within HPC community and support for both native Singularity as well as Docker containers. Complete information about singularity can be found at http://singularity.lbl.gov/