coMtainer: Compilation-assisted HPC Container Images with Enhanced Adaptability

The increasing interconnectivity of HPC systems has highlighted the need for efficient application migration across different environments. Containers, widely adopted for this purpose, simplify deployment but often fail to deliver optimal performance due to the separated build and execution container workflow. This leads to generic container images that miss out on system-specific software stack advantages, a challenge we define as the adaptability issue.

We propose coMtainer, a compilation-assisted image transformation framework that embeds build-time information into images. This enables remote HPC systems to specialize and rebuild the container using native toolchains and libraries. coMtainer preserves image neutrality while resolving the adaptability issue, allowing optimized execution without user involvement. Moreover, the embedded metadata unlocks advanced compiler optimizations such as LTO and PGO. We implement and evaluate coMtainer across a variety of real-world HPC applications, demonstrating coMtainer's practicability, applicability and effectiveness.