Hi everyone,
I’m currently facing a challenge with HPC computing in conjunction with Canonical’s Snapcraft. We’re trying to deploy certain applications using Snapcraft on our HPC environment, but we’ve run into some roadblocks.
Has anyone here successfully integrated Snapcraft with an HPC setup? What potential issues should I be aware of, and are there any specific configurations or workarounds that might help resolve compatibility problems?
Any advice or insights from those who’ve tackled similar issues would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks & Best Regards!
Jonathan Jone
Hi there @jonathanjone 
I can potentially help you here. The Ubuntu High-Performance Computing community has been working on developing a set of snaps to use within HPC systems, although we’ve mostly be targeting server applications like Slurm or Open OnDemand and not necessarily end-user applications. That said, I do have some questions for you!
- What applications are you snapping? Can we see the snapcraft.yaml file that you’re using?
- What roadblocks are you currently facing? We’ve found quite a few ways of working around different challenges with the applications that we work with.
Re. issues you should be aware of, there are currently outstanding challenges around with NFS home directories when the root_squash configuration is enabled. Snap won’t be able to clean up and/or snapshot the $SNAP_USER_COMMON or $SNAP_USER_DATA directories because the root user will be remapped to a random uid/gid. For the time being this can be worked around by passing the --purge flag to the snap remove ... command when deleting snaps, and we’re working on a longer term fix within snapd.
Also, this thread might contain some helpful information: Problems with High-Performance Computing and Canonical Snapcraft. Any Advice?
I’m also happy to set up a meeting as well to discuss your challenges further in-depth. Looking forward to your response 
1 Like
