NWP Containers Online Tutorial | Introduction > Platform Options

Docker was the first container platform explored by this project and, thus, has been tested robustly across local machines and on the cloud (AWS). Using Docker, the end-to-end containerized NWP system described here is fully functional on a local machine or on AWS. A few disadvantages to the Docker software are that root permissions are required to install and update, and it requires additional tools to run across multiple nodes, which are not needed nor supported for this particular application.

• Recommended for use on local machines or AWS

Singularity is also an option for running all but the final component (METviewer) of the end-to-end containerized NWP system by converting Docker images on Dockerhub to Singularity image files. Similar to Docker, installing and updating Singularity software requires root permissions. A few advantages to Singularity are that it was designed for High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms and can more efficiently run on multiple nodes on certain platforms. The functionality to run METviewer using Singularity is still a work in progress, so if there is a desire to create verification plots from the MET output, it will be necessary to use Docker for this step at this time.

• Recommended for use on HPC platforms or AWS

• Not recommended for use on MacOS

If you have access to a Linux/Unix based machine–whether a laptop, desktop, or compute cluster–it is likely that you will be able to run this entire tutorial on that machine.                                                                            

Click here for instructions for "Running On A Local Machine"

This tutorial can also be run on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud compute platform. We provide a pre-built image which should have all the software necessary for running the tutorial. Cloud computing costs will be incurred.

Click here for instructions for "Running in the Cloud"