“At Los Alamos National Laboratory, home to more than 100 supercomputers since the dawn of the computing era, elegance and simplicity of programming are highly valued but not always achieved. In the case of a new product, dubbed “Charliecloud,” a crisp 800-line code helps supercomputer users operate in the high-performance world of Big Data without burdening computer center staff with the peculiarities of their particular software needs. “Charliecloud lets users easily run crazy new things on our supercomputers,” said lead developer Reid Priedhorsky of the High Performance Computing Division at Los Alamos. “Los Alamos has lots of supercomputing power, and we do lots of simulations that are well supported here. But we’ve found that Big Data analysis projects need to use different frameworks, which often have dependencies that differ from what we have already on the supercomputer. So, we’ve developed a lightweight ‘container’ approach that lets users package their own user defined software stack in isolation from the host operating system.””