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Boutiques: an application-sharing system based on Linux containers.

Tristan Glatard1, 2*, Rafael F. Da Silva3, Nouha Boujelben2, R. ADALAT1, Natacha Beck1, Pierre Rioux1, Marc-Etienne Rousseau1, Ewa Deelman3 and Alan C. Evans1
  • 1 McGill, Canada
  • 2 CNRS, CREATIS, France
  • 3 University of Southern California, Information Sciences Institute, United States

Porting applications to computing platforms is a costly and error-prone process which is often replicated several times while sharing applications would enable repurposing and facilitate interoperability. Existing application-sharing systems are usually bound to a particular infrastructure or execution environment, which makes applications hardly transferable between platforms. Recently, the wide spreading of Linux containerization, in particular through the Docker system, has enabled the sharing of virtual appliances at an unprecedented scale. We present the Boutiques application-sharing system based on Docker containers. Applications described in Boutiques consist of (1) a JSON descriptor stored in a Git repository and (2) a Docker image containing the application and all its dependencies. We implemented software tools to create Boutiques applications and to import them to CBRAIN [1], VIP [2], and Pegasus [3]. Using this framework, we were able to import 11 applications from Boutiques to our three platforms in a few hours only. This proves the concept of Boutiques which we plan to extend to other computing platforms and to more complex application descriptions, including pipelines.

References

[1] T. Sherif, P. Rioux, M. Rousseau, N. Kassis, N. Beck, R. Adalat, S. Das, T. Glatard, and A. C. Evans, "CBRAIN: A web-based, distributed computing platform for collaborative neuroimaging research", Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, vol. 8, no. 54, 2014
[2] T. Glatard, C. Lartizien, B. Gibaud, R. Ferreira da Silva, G. Forestier, F. Cervenansky, M. Alessandrini, H. Benoit-Cattin, O. Bernard, S. Camarasu-Pop, N. Cerezo, P. Clarysse, A. Gaignard, P. Hugonnard, H. Liebgott, S. Marache, A. Marion, J. Montagnat, J. Tabary, and D. Friboulet, "A Virtual Imaging Platform for multi-modality medical image simulation", IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 110-118, 2013
[3] E. Deelman, K. Vahi, G. Juve, M. Rynge, S. Callaghan, P. J. Maechling, R. Mayani, W. Chen, R. Ferreira da Silva, M. Livny, and K. Wenger, “Pegasus, a workflow management system for science automation,” Future Generation Computer Systems, vol. 46, pp. 17–35, 2015.

Keywords: application-sharing, computing platforms, linux containers, CBRAIN, VIP, Pegasus

Conference: Neuroinformatics 2015, Cairns, Australia, 20 Aug - 22 Aug, 2015.

Presentation Type: Poster, to be considered for oral presentation

Topic: General neuroinformatics

Citation: Glatard T, Da Silva RF, Boujelben N, ADALAT R, Beck N, Rioux P, Rousseau M, Deelman E and Evans AC (2015). Boutiques: an application-sharing system based on Linux containers.
. Front. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: Neuroinformatics 2015. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2015.91.00012

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Received: 03 May 2015; Published Online: 05 Aug 2015.

* Correspondence: Dr. Tristan Glatard, McGill, Montreal, Canada, tristan.glatard@concordia.ca