Using Singularity for Geant4-based simulations on HPC infrastructures

Containers represent a well-known paradigm, which has been widely adopted in enterprises thanks to its ability to conveniently address issues related to fast delivery, portability and life-cycle management of software. On the contrary, they received so far modest attention in the scientific community and their adoption in experimental physics computing has progressed relatively slowly. Scientific applications are typically complex because of several factors. Among them the heterogeneous system requirements, i.e. specific versions of libraries and compilers, and the frequent updates, normally developed by researchers who are not familiar with software engineering principles. Containers would greatly foster scientific activities in terms of software availability, reproducibility, and shareability, in particular for small research groups that need to couple scientific, sysadmin and programming skills in one or a few persons. In this contribution we briefly present an experience using Singularity containers for running a multithreaded simulation based on Geant4 using different INFN computing infrastructures.