StarCluster 0.92.1

StarCluster is a utility for creating and managing computing clusters hosted on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

StarCluster:

Cluster Computing Toolkit for the Cloud

Version:

0.92.1

Author:

Justin Riley <[e-mail]>

Team:

Software Tools for Academics and Researchers (http://web.mit.edu/star)

Homepage:

http://web.mit.edu/starcluster

License:

LGPL

Description:

StarCluster is a utility for creating and managing computing clusters hosted on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). StarCluster utilizes Amazon’s EC2 web service to create and destroy clusters of Linux virtual machines on demand.

All that’s needed to create your own cluster(s) on Amazon EC2 is an AWS account and StarCluster. StarCluster features:

• Simple configuration - with examples ready to go out-of-the-box

• Create/Manage Clusters - simple start command to automatically launch and configure one or more clusters on EC2

• Automated Cluster Setup - includes NFS-sharing, Sun Grid Engine queuing system, password-less ssh between machines, and more

• Scientific Computing AMI - contains OpenMPI, ATLAS, Lapack, NumPy, SciPy, and other useful libraries

• EBS Volume Sharing - easily NFS-share Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes across a cluster for persistent storage

• EBS-Backed Clusters - start and stop EBS-backed clusters on EC2

• Cluster Compute Instances - support for “cluster compute” instance types

• Add/Remove Nodes - scale a cluster by adding or removing nodes

• Elastic Load Balancing - automatically shrink or expand a cluster based on Sun Grid Engine queue statistics

• Plugin Support - allows users to run additional setup routines on the cluster after StarCluster’s defaults by writing simple plugins in Python

• and more…

Interested? See the getting started section for more details.

Getting Started:

Install StarCluster using easy_install:

$ sudo easy_install StarCluster

or to install StarCluster manually:

$ (Download StarCluster from http://web.mit.edu/starcluster)
$ tar xvzf starcluster-X.X.X.tar.gz  (where x.x.x is a version number)
$ cd starcluster-X.X.X
$ sudo python setup.py install

After the software has been installed, the next step is to setup the configuration file:

$ starcluster help
StarCluster - (http://web.mit.edu/starcluster) (v. 0.9999)
Software Tools for Academics and Researchers (STAR)
Please submit bug reports to [e-mail]

cli.py:87 - ERROR - config file /home/user/.starcluster/config does not exist

Options:
--------
[1] Show the StarCluster config template
[2] Write config template to /home/user/.starcluster/config
[q] Quit

Please enter your selection:

Select the second option by typing 2 and pressing enter. This will give you a template to use to create a configuration file containing your AWS credentials, cluster settings, etc. The next step is to customize this file using your favorite text-editor:

$ vi ~/.starcluster/config

This file is commented with example “cluster templates”. A cluster template defines a set of configuration settings used to start a new cluster. The example config provides a smallcluster template that is ready to go out-of-the-box. However, first, you must fill in your AWS credentials and keypair info:

[aws info]
aws_access_key_id = #your aws access key id here
aws_secret_access_key = #your secret aws access key here
aws_user_id = #your 12-digit aws user id here

The next step is to fill in your keypair information. If you don’t already have a keypair you can create one from StarCluster using:

$ starcluster createkey mykey -o ~/.ssh/mykey.rsa

This will create a keypair called mykey on Amazon EC2 and save the private key to ~/.ssh/mykey.rsa. Once you have a key the next step is to fill-in your keypair info in the StarCluster config file:

[key key-name-here]
key_location = /path/to/your/keypair.rsa

For example, the section for the keypair created above using the createkey command would look like:

[key mykey]
key_location = ~/.ssh/mykey.rsa

After defining your keypair in the config, the next step is to update the default cluster template smallcluster with the name of your keypair on EC2:

[cluster smallcluster]
keyname = key-name-here

For example, the smallcluster template would be updated to look like:

[cluster smallcluster]
keyname = mykey

Now that the config file has been set up we’re ready to start using StarCluster. Next we start a cluster named “mycluster” using the default cluster template smallcluster in the example config:

$ starcluster start mycluster

The default_template setting in the [global] section of the config specifies the default cluster template and is automatically set to smallcluster in the example config.

After the start command completes you should now have a working cluster. You can login to the master node as root by running:

$ starcluster sshmaster mycluster

You can also copy files to/from the cluster using the put and get commands. To copy a file or entire directory from your local computer to the cluster:

$ starcluster put /path/to/local/file/or/dir /remote/path/

To copy a file or an entire directory from the cluster to your local computer:

$ starcluster get /path/to/remote/file/or/dir /local/path/

Once you’ve finished using the cluster and wish to stop paying for it:

$ starcluster terminate mycluster

Have a look at the rest of StarCluster’s available commands:

$ starcluster --help

Dependencies:

• Amazon AWS Account

• Python 2.5+

• Boto 2.0

• Paramiko 1.7.7.1

• WorkerPool 0.9.2

• Jinja2 2.5.5

• decorator 3.3.1

Learn more…

Watch an ~8 minute screencast @ http://web.mit.edu/starcluster

To learn more have a look at the documentation: http://web.mit.edu/starcluster/docs/latest

Licensing

StarCluster is licensed under the LGPLv3 See COPYING.LESSER (LGPL) and COPYING (GPL) for LICENSE details

What’s New?

See http://web.mit.edu/starcluster/docs/latest/changelog.html for the full version history.

Features

• Support for splitting the config into an arbitrary set of files:

  [global]
  include=~/.starcluster/awscreds, ~/.starcluster/myconf

  See Splitting the Config for more details

• createvolume: support naming/tagging newly created volumes:

  $ starcluster createvolume --name mynewvol 30 us-east-1d

  See Create and Format a new EBS Volume for more details

• listvolumes: add support for filtering by tags:

  $ starcluster listvolumes --name mynewvol
  $ starcluster listvolumes --tag mykey=myvalue

  See Managing EBS Volumes with StarCluster for more details

• sshmaster, sshnode, sshinstance: support for running remote commands from command line:

  $ starcluster sshmaster mycluster 'cat /etc/fstab'
  $ starcluster sshnode mycluster node001 'cat /etc/fstab'
  $ starcluster sshinstance i-99999999 'cat /etc/hosts'

  See Running Remote Commands on a Cluster from Command Line for more details

Bug Fixes

The following bugs were fixed in this release:

spothistory command

• add package_data to sdist in order to include the necessary web media and templates needed for the --plot feature. The previous 0.92 version left these out and thus the --plot feature was broken. This should be fixed.

• fix bug when launching default browser on mac

start command

• fix bug in option completion when using the start command’s --cluster-template option

terminate command

• fix bug in terminate cmd when region != us-east-1

listkeypairs command

• fix bug in list_keypairs when no keys exist

Improvements

• listinstances: add ‘state_reason’ msg to output if available

• add system info, Python info, and package versions to crash-report

• listregions: sort regions by name

• improved bash/zsh completion support. completion will read from the correct config file, if possible, in the case that the global -c option is specified while completing.

• separate the timing of cluster setup into time spent on waiting for EC2 instances to come up and time spent configuring the cluster after all instances are up and running. this is useful when profiling StarCluster’s performance on large (100+ node) clusters.