gotop

gotop is a very useful app that I use all the time in our department cluster. Even though I have root privileges in our HPC cluster, I’d rather do my computing as a regular user. It keeps me in check and forces me to think like a power/regular user.

Hence, I use gotop in a Singularity container.

Source code

You can find the recipe to build the container here.

To facilitate building the container, you will find two simple scripts in the repository

• rbuild.sh. Builds the image remotely and then pulls it down locally. You will need access to SyLabs.io Remote Builder to do this. Getting access to the Remote Builder is beyond the scope of this post.
• build.sh. Builds the image locally. You will need root privileges to build the container locally.

Building the image locally

The script build.sh looks like

#!/bin/bash

IMAGE=singularity-gotop.simg
DEFINITION=Singularity

if [ -f $IMAGE ]; then
	rm -fv $IMAGE
fi

sudo singularity build $IMAGE $DEFINITION

To build the image locally simply run

bash ./build.sh

The output should look similar to

Building the image remotely

The script rbuild.sh looks like

#!/bin/bash

IMAGE=singularity-gotop.simg
DEFINITION=Singularity

if [ -f $IMAGE ]; then
	rm -fv $IMAGE
fi

singularity build --remote $IMAGE $DEFINITION

If you notice, there isn’t much difference between this script and the previous script.

To build the image remotely simply run

bash ./rbuild.sh

The output should look similar to

A note on building remotely. Because my script is simple and straightforward, there are no annotations associated with this build. If you were to take a look at my profile in SyLabs.io you will notice there is a new project associated with the remote build

This is a footprint, evidence the image was built remotely. Also notice the download number is 1. This is because running the remote commands builds the container then downloads it locally.

Running gotop

To run the app in the container, simply run

singularity exec singularity-gotop.simg gotop

The output should look similar to