Containerization in ATLAS Software Development and Data Production

The ATLAS experiment’s software production and distribution on the grid benefits from an almost automated infrastructure that provides the up-to-date information about software usability and availability through the CVMFS distribution service for all relevant systems. The software development process uses a Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline of testing, validation, packaging and installation steps. For the opportunistic sites that can not access CVMFS containerized releases are needed. Currently these standalone containers are created manually to support Monte-Carlo data production at such sites. In this paper we will describe an automated procedure for the containerization of the ATLAS software releases in the software development infrastructure and the reasons to do it, together with its integration and testing in the distributed computing system.