Using full CMSSW containers

Overview

Teaching: 10 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• How can I obtain a standalone CMSSW container?

Objectives

• Understanding how to find and use standalone CMSSW containers.

As discussed in the introduction, the images that contain full CMSSW releases can be very big. CMS computing therefore does not routinely build these images. However, as part of the CMS Open Data effort, images are provided for some releases. You can find those on Docker Hub. In addition, a build service is currently under development.

If you would like to use these images, you can use them in the same way as the other CMS images with the only difference that the CMSSW software in the container is in /opt/cms and not within /cvmfs/cms.cern.ch.

You can run the containers as follows (pick either bash or zsh) when using the version published on Docker Hub:

docker run --rm -it cmsopendata/cmssw:10_6_8_patch1 /bin/zsh

The images are in several cases also mirrored on the CERN GitLab registry:

docker run --rm -it gitlab-registry.cern.ch/clange/cmssw-docker/cmssw_10_6_8_patch1 /bin/zsh

Do not use for large-scale job submission nor on GitLab!

Due to the large size of these images, they should only be used for local development.

Key Points

• Standalone CMSSW containers are currently not routinely built due to their size.

• They need to be built/requested when needed.