[petsc-dev] Docker images and NERSC's Shifter

[Jed Brown]

The PETSc and FEniCS Dockerfiles and linked images here might be of
interest to anyone running at an HPC facility that supports NERSC's
Shifter.

  https://github.com/jedbrown/jedbrown-dockerfiles

IMO, Shifter is far superior to any other HPC deployment mechanism and
really should be supported everywhere. Using SLURM, it boils down to
running (once)

  shifterimg pull docker:jedbrown/petsc:latest

then

  sbatch --image docker:jedbrown/petsc:latest ...

with

  srun -n 64 shifter ./your-petsc-app

No need to futz with HPC build environments, modules, etc.  You can
build in the Shifter environment on a login node (see README).  If you
must use Python or other shared libraries, performance at scale is
better (https://docs.nersc.gov/development/shifter/overview/) than any
other low-hassle Python deployment technique.

Comments welcome.  I think we should consider automating the publishing
of nightly updates for 'maint' and 'master', perhaps with a few common
build configurations (int64, etc.).

You'll notice that the Dockerfiles have some manual repairs for
overzealous RPATH.  We should have a configure option to avoid RPATH,
and perhaps default to not using RPATH for any paths that don't need it
(i.e., those that are already managed by the system ldconfig).