[petsc-users] Docker performance

[Mohammad Mirzadeh]

I have been recently hearing about Docker [1] and its potential as a
"platform-independent" environment for application development. At first it
sounded just like another VM to me until I came across this IBM Research
paper [2] and this SO post [3] (to be fair I still don't get the detailed
differences ... )

Whats exciting about paper, is that they report quite impressive
performance metrics for docker, e.g. for LINPACK and stream tests. So I
just tried installing PETSc in a ubuntu image for myself tonight and I got
relatively close performance for a toy example (2D poisson) compared to my
native development setup (OS X) (~%5-10 loss - although I was not using the
same petsc, mpi, etc).

So I thought to share my excitement with other users who might find this
useful. Personally I don't see myself using docker a whole lot; not now
anyway, mostly because after years of suffering on OS X, I think homebrew
has reached a mature point :).

I would love to hear if anyone has more interesting stories to share! Also,
perhaps having a standard petsc container could be beneficial, specially to
new users? Anyway, food for thought!

Cheers,
Mohammad

[1]: https://www.docker.com/what-docker
[2]:
http://domino.research.ibm.com/library/cyberdig.nsf/papers/0929052195DD819C85257D2300681E7B/$File/rc25482.pdf
[3]:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16047306/how-is-docker-different-from-a-normal-virtual-machine
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