  A National Science Foundation-sponsored container runtimes investigation was
conducted by the Aristotle Cloud Federation to better understand the challenges
of selecting and using Docker, Singularity, and X-Containers. The main goal of
this investigation was to identify the "pain points" experienced by users when
selecting and using containers for scientific research and to share lessons
learned. Application performance characteristics are included in this report as
well as user experiences with Kubernetes and container orchestration on cloud
and HPC platforms. Scientists, research computing practitioners, and educators
may find value in this report when considering the use and/or deployment of
containers or when preparing students to meet the unique challenges of using
containers in scientific research.
