I have been recently hearing about Docker [1] and its potential as a "platform-independent" environment for application development. At first it sounded just like another VM to me until I came across this IBM Research paper [2] and this SO post [3] (to be fair I still don't get the detailed differences ... )
Whats exciting about paper, is that they report quite impressive performance metrics for docker, e.g. for LINPACK and stream tests. So I just tried installing PETSc in a ubuntu image for myself tonight and I got relatively close performance for a toy example (2D poisson) compared to my native development setup (OS X) (~%5-10 loss - although I was not using the same petsc, mpi, etc). So I thought to share my excitement with other users who might find this useful. Personally I don't see myself using docker a whole lot; not now anyway, mostly because after years of suffering on OS X, I think homebrew has reached a mature point :). I would love to hear if anyone has more interesting stories to share! Also, perhaps having a standard petsc container could be beneficial, specially to new users? Anyway, food for thought! Cheers, Mohammad [1]: https://www.docker.com/what-docker [2]: http://domino.research.ibm.com/library/cyberdig.nsf/papers/0929052195DD819C85257D2300681E7B/$File/rc25482.pdf [3]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16047306/how-is-docker-different-from-a-normal-virtual-machine
