key4hep and AlmaLinux 8

[saraheno]

Hi,
I am starting to use key4hep for the Calvision calorimetry project for the IDEA detector for FCCee. I see it is only available on a very limited set of operating systems now (CentOS/RHEL 7, AlmaLinux/RockyLinux/RHEL 9, Ubuntu 22.04). It would be very hard for me to switch my local cluster to this, and very hard to work on lxplus due to the bandwidth between CERN and US.

Is there any chance at all of getting an AlmaLinux 8 version? I think this may be common as it may be the official version for most CMS code?

When I posted this in the wrong place, you told me to use docker/singularity. Bearing in mind that I'm 62, can you point me to an example of how to do this? It may not be impossible, but I'd need a cookbook recipe. And I'd prefer to be able to run ddsim in the same "docker".

[andresailer]

Hi Sarah,

• Do you have apptainer installed? (probably because that is probably what CMS is using?)
• Do you have /cvmfs/unpacked.cern.ch on it?

apptainer run -B /cvmfs:/cvmfs /cvmfs/unpacked.cern.ch/gitlab-registry.cern.ch/sft/docker/alma9-core\:latest/

If you don't have /cvmfs/unpacked.cern.ch

apptainer run -B /cvmfs:/cvmfs docker://gitlab-registry.cern.ch/sft/docker/alma9-core:latest

This puts you into an alma9 container and should let you run the key4hep software

[andresailer]

Or better the key4hep images

apptainer run -B /cvmfs:/cvmfs docker://ghcr.io/key4hep/key4hep-images/alma9

[saraheno]

No, our cluster doesn't have apptainer. I'll see if my system manager is willing to install.

I've confirmed that at least one of my other colleauges (Rutgers) run AlmaLinux 8.

[andresailer]

Maybe it is still called singularity?

[saraheno]

What would be the magic command to use singularity? Our sys admin says CMS requires us have singularity and that singularity conflicts with apptainer...

[jmcarcell]

Singularity is something similar to other tools to run or build containers, but the commands to run them can be different sometimes. Try:

singularity run -B /cvmfs:/cvmfs docker://ghcr.io/key4hep/key4hep-images/alma9

[andresailer]

apptainer is just the new name of singularity...

$ ls -l /usr/bin/singularity 
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 9 Dec  5 14:11 /usr/bin/singularity -> apptainer