Sylabs a Finalist in America’s DataHub Innovation Challenge

Singularity Container Developer to Pitch “Up-Armored” Containers at The Defense TechConnect Innovation Summit

Reno, NV – (September 14, 2022) – Sylabs, the global leader in providing container technology and services for performance-intensive workloads, today announced that it has been selected by America’s DataHub Consortium (ADC), in partnership with Tech Connect and Advanced Technology International (ATI), as a finalist in America’s DataHub Innovation Challenge. In addition to receiving a membership to the ADC, Sylabs has been invited to a pitch competition on September 27th at the Defense TechConnect Innovation Summit in Washington D.C. for a chance to win $50k in non-dilutive funds.

Sylabs pitch will revolve around building “up-armored” OCI-compatible containers that provide increased security for cloud environments as well as onfield-deployed devices out to the tactical edge. Sylabs will propose developing software container technology based on its open source Singularity containers and associated Singularity Image Format (SIF) to be adapted to fit within the DoD Enterprise DevSecOps strategy (released in March 2021), which has a strong focus on OCI compatibility.

“Security around the software supply chain has become an increasing point of concern in virtually every industry, but it is especially sensitive where weapons systems and sensitive C4I systems are being developed and used by defense organizations,” said Jason Tuschen, CEO of Sylabs and retired Navy SEAL. “Software supply chains span everything from High Performance Computing (HPC) Clouds, where development and simulation is done, all the way to the embedded systems and software in the live production environment. A container format that can nimbly manage across testing environments down to operational environments is critical for the effective execution of a DevSecOps strategy that covers the entire build pipeline. As the leader in developing open source Singularity, the most advanced container technology used for deploying complex workloads securely in performance-intensive computing environments, Sylabs is best positioned to produce ‘up-armored’ containers applicable for deployment in hostile environments where security is paramount.”

Adding expanded security for the Singularity container ecosystem has been a particular theme of focus for Sylabs in 2022. In August the company announced a collaboration with Anchore to bring Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) support for Singularity containers through Anchore’s open source Syft. Through Syft users within the Singularity ecosystem are able to gain deep visibility into container images for the proactive securing of the software supply chain. The collaboration also enabled the utilization of Grype, Anchore’s vulnerability scanner for container images and filesystems. With Grype, developers are able to quickly scan SBOMs for vulnerabilities, ensuring that the container is clean of any exploits that could be used for malicious purposes. The SIF container image format continues to receive wide support by other open source projects such as Podman and Apptainer.

“As a company born out of an open source project, and committed to open source development, we’re always excited when we have the opportunity to work with others, share ideas, and help bring support for Singularity images to other projects,” wrote Singularity lead developer, Dave Trudgian in a recent blog post. “Singularity, and the SIF container format, are used throughout the high performance computing (HPC) world and in other performance-intensive compute workflows due to their unique benefits. While we’re committed to developing Singularity and SIF to provide solutions that are optimized for these environments, we recognize the need to fit neatly into the broader Open Containers Initiative (OCI) ecosystem.”

The most current version of the Singularity container runtime is available via the SingularityCE 3.10 release with download and documentation information available at https://sylabs.io/singularity/.

About Sylabs

Sylabs is the global leader in providing professional tools and services for high performance container runtime technology. Sylabs makes high performance computing more accessible to researchers, scientists, and engineers using Singularity, the most advanced open source container runtime technology for performance-intensive applications and environments. As the most active contributor to the Singularity ecosystem, through both the community edition and Sylabs’ enterprise-supported and professional implementations, Sylabs is dedicated to enabling cutting-edge research and facilitating rapid scientific discovery to solve some of humanity’s greatest challenges. For more information about Singularity runtime technology, including SingularityCE (Community Edition), Singularity Container Services, SingularityPRO, and Singularity Enterprise, visit https://www.sylabs.io.

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