Environment Definition File (EDF)¶

The Environment Definition File (EDF) is the central abstraction in Sarus Suite. An EDF is a small, declarative file that describes:

Which image to run
Which paths to mount into the container
The working directory and entrypoint behavior
Environment variables
Annotations that control hooks and performance extensions

EDF lets users define their runtime environment once. The suite then maps that description onto Podman, Parallax, scheduler integrations and device configuration on each cluster.

Example EDF¶

image = "ghcr.io#sarus-suite/containerfiles-ci/transformers:latest-arm64"
mounts = ["/iopsstor/scratch/models/hf:/opt/hf",
          "/iopsstor/scratch/data:/data",
          "/iopsstor/scratch/output:/output"]
workdir = "${SCRATCH}"
entrypoint = false

[env]
HUGGINGFACE_HUB_CACHE = "/opt/hf/hub"
TRANSFORMERS_CACHE = "/opt/hf/transformers"
DEBUG = "false"

[annotations]
com.hooks.cxi.enabled = "true"
com.hooks.aws_ofi_nccl.enabled = "true"
com.hooks.aws_ofi_nccl.variant = "cuda12"
com.hooks.nvidia_cuda_mps.enabled = "true"

This EDF describes an ML workload based on the transformers library, pulling a container image from GitHub Container Registry, mounting model/data/output paths from a shared filesystem, and configuring caches via environment variables. The annotations enable specific hooks (e.g. CXI, NCCL, NVIDIA CUDA MPS) so that the container can leverage the underlying HPC system.