7. Deployment with Docker

OpenMC can be easily deployed using Docker on any Windows, Mac or Linux system. With Docker running, execute the following command in the shell to build a Docker image called debian/openmc:latest:

docker build -t debian/openmc:latest https://github.com/openmc-dev/openmc.git#develop

Note

This may take 5 – 10 minutes to run to completion.

This command will execute the instructions in OpenMC’s Dockerfile to build a Docker image with OpenMC installed. The image includes OpenMC with MPICH and parallel HDF5 in the /opt/openmc directory, and Miniconda3 with all of the Python pre-requisites (NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, etc.) installed. The NJOY2016 codebase is installed in /opt/NJOY2016 to support full functionality and testing of the openmc.data Python module. The publicly available nuclear data libraries necessary to run OpenMC’s test suite – including NNDC and WMP cross sections and ENDF data – are in the /opt/openmc/data directory, and the corresponding OPENMC_CROSS_SECTIONS, OPENMC_MULTIPOLE_LIBRARY, and OPENMC_ENDF_DATA environment variables are initialized.

After building the Docker image, you can run the following to see the names of all images on your machine, including debian/openmc:latest:

docker image ls

Now you can run the following to create a Docker container called my_openmc based on the debian/openmc:latest image:

docker run -it --name=my_openmc debian/openmc:latest

This command will open an interactive shell running from within the Docker container where you have access to use OpenMC.

Note

The docker run command supports many options for spawning containers – including mounting volumes from the host filesystem – which many users will find useful.