Singularity crashes when running heudiconv fmri data conversion (FATAL error)

[John-Chin]

Version of Apptainer

What version of Apptainer (or Singularity) are you using?

singularity version 3.1.0

Expected behavior

I ran this command:
singularity run --bind /home:/home --bind /mnt:/mnt --cleanenv /mnt/tools/singularity/heudiconv-0.13.0.simg -d /mnt/fmri/rawdata/LD001/*/*dcm -b -o /mnt/fmri/subjects -f convertall -s 001 -c dcm2niix --overwrite --minmeta

For background, I am trying to run a fMRI data conversion command (dicom to BIDS) via heudiconv on the singularity container. (Loosely following this tutorial)

What did you expect to see when you ran the command?

When I ran the 'singularity run' command, I expected to see a new folder LD001 created in my output directory (-o /mnt/fmri/subjects) that contains a file structure of converted fmri nifti data files and sidecar json files.

Actual behavior

What actually happened? Why was it incorrect?
Unfortunately nothing happened, which should not be so. When I ran the command, I immediately saw this error:
FATAL: failed to initialize runtime: engine "" is not found

Full debug output:

VERBOSE [U=0,P=10140]      print()                       Set messagelevel to: 5
DEBUG   [U=0,P=10140]      init()                        PIPE_EXEC_FD value: 7
VERBOSE [U=0,P=10140]      init()                        Container runtime
VERBOSE [U=0,P=10140]      is_suid()                     Check if we are running as setuid
DEBUG   [U=0,P=10140]      init()                        Overlay seems supported by kernel
DEBUG   [U=0,P=10140]      init()                        Drop privileges
DEBUG   [U=1000,P=10140]   init()                        Read json configuration from pipe
DEBUG   [U=1000,P=10140]   init()                        Set child signal mask
DEBUG   [U=1000,P=10140]   init()                        Wait completion of stage1
VERBOSE [U=1000,P=10151]   priv_escalate()               Get root privileges
DEBUG   [U=0,P=10151]      set_parent_death_signal()     Set parent death signal to 9
DEBUG   [U=0,P=10151]      prepare_stage()               Entering in stage 1
DEBUG   [U=1000,P=10151]   set_parent_death_signal()     Set parent death signal to 9
VERBOSE [U=1000,P=10151]   init()                        Spawn stage 1
VERBOSE [U=1000,P=10151]   startup()                     Execute stage 1
FATAL   [U=1000,P=10151]   getEngine()                   failed to initialize runtime: engine "" is not found
VERBOSE [U=1000,P=10140]   init()                        stage 1 exited with status 255

What's weird is that I've ran this command before with no error at all. Just a couple days ago this command was running fine on older data. Today, however, when I ran this command on new fMRI data, I suddenly saw this error. Perhaps it's because the new data I am trying to convert has a lot of dicom files, but that shouldn't really make Synology crash, I don't think.

What OS/distro are you running

Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS

How did you install Apptainer

From source.

[DrDaveD]

singularity-3.1.0 is almost 5 years old. Please try it with a recent version of apptainer.

Ubuntu 18 is also past its End of Life.