StarCluster

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StarCluster
(http//web.mit.edu/starcluster)
HPC on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud
Justin Riley (jtriley_at_mit.edu) Software Tools
for Academics and Researchers Office of
Educational Innovation and Technology Massachusett
s Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts
Ave. Cambridge, MA 02139
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Outline

• About STAR
• Overview of Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Hardware
• Motivations Behind StarCluster
• About StarCluster
• StarCluster Features
• StarCluster Advantages
• StarCluster Live Demo
• EC2 Performance
• Materials Science Research Case Study

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About STAR
What's your biggest problem bringing your
research into the classroom?
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Overview of

• Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Features
• Amazon EC2 allows you to dynamically allocate
  and terminate Linux virtual machines with a
  variety of hardware configurations
• Pay only for what you use (i.e. machine hours
  and data transfer)
• Ability to capture software configurations into
  Amazon Machine Images (AMI) for later use.
• AMI's can be used to launch multiple machines
  with identical software configurations.

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Overview of

• Elastic Block Storage (EBS) Features
• EBS volumes are highly available, highly
  reliable volumes that can be attached to a
  running Amazon EC2 machine and are exposed as
  standard block devices
• Allows you to create point-in-time snapshots of
  your data.
• Pay per month based on allocation as well as per
  1 million I/O requests (0.10/GB allocated/month
  and 0.10/million I/O requests)
• 1GB-1TB limit per EBS volume

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Elatic Compute Cloud Hardware
One EC2 Compute Unit provides the equivalent CPU
capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007
Xeon processor.
Standard Instances
High CPU Instances
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Motivations Behind StarCluster
StarHPC - an on demand compute cluster for
parallel programming with both OpenMP and OpenMPI
technologies. It provides a virtual desktop
environment, hosted on EC2, configured with all
the necessary tools for programming in
OpenMP/OpenMPI. http//web.mit.edu/star/hpc
StarMolsim - a web application used to run
materials modeling research software. It enables
the user to run various simulations on a
distributed compute cluster and retrieve the
results, all from a web browser. http//web.mit.e
du/star/molsim
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HPC in the Classroom
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StarHPC
Use case students have direct access to a HPC
cluster to actively develop parallel programs
using the Message Passing Interface (MPI)
SSH/VNC
StarHPC was used for 2 weeks in an Independent
Activities Period (IAP) course for parallel
programming using OpenMP and OpenMPI.
Result Creating a 4-node cluster for two weeks
came out to about 25 per student using Amazon
EC2.
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StarMolsim
Use case students log in to a web application as
a proxy to the computing resources. The web
application handles communicating with the
cluster to submit jobs, retrieve the results, etc.
User
Web Server hosting GenePattern from the Broad
Institute of MIT and Harvard
Result Amazon EC2 was used to replace a
traditional 9-node HPC cluster for an entire
semester. The cost for using the 9 node EC2
cluster for the semester was around
3,000-4,000.
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About StarCluster
StarCluster is a utility for creating and
managing general purpose compute clusters hosted
on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
StarCluster makes it easy for a user to create
their own compute cluster on EC2 and pay only for
what they use.

• StarCluster Dependencies
• Registered and fully configured EC2 account.
• Python 2.4
• Paramiko library for Python

• Software included in the virtual machine
• OpenMPI
• NFS'd /home directory
• Sun Grid Engine
• Scipy/Numpy/IPython
• Compilers for installing your own custom
  software
• Ubuntu Linux OS with apt-get for installing
  additional OS software

http//web.mit.edu/stardev/cluster
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StarCluster Features

• Simple configuration with sensible defaults
• One command to create and configure a n-node
  cluster on EC2
•  
• Utilizes Amazon's Elastic Block Storage to store
  and snapshot your applications and data.
•  
• Easily recreate identical working environments
• 32bit/64bit Ubuntu 9.04 public AMI's
•  

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StarCluster Features

•  Automatic Configuration of
•  
• Sun Grid Engine with Parallel Environment (PE)
•  
• OpenMPI with SGE PE Support
•  
• NFS shares (e.g. /home and /opt) 
•  
• Passwordless SSH
•  
• 147GB local scratch space on /scratch for each
  node
•  

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StarCluster Advantages

• Portable, launch a cluster from virtually
  anywhere!
• Supplements existing resources when needed
• Easily store your applications and data in the
  cloud via EBS. Simply upload your
  applications/data to /home and your data will be
  available each time you launch StarCluster.
• Easy to install additional OS software. Just
  launch the AMI, use the package manager to
  install additional software, and rebundle the AMI
  to create your own customized version of
  StarCluster
• Easily package results of computational
  experiment for reproducible research

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StarCluster Live Demo
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EC2 Performance
Summary Message Passing extremely poor in
comparison to local HPC resources. Embarrassingly
Parallel much better, but still under performs
compared to local HPC resources.
Walker, E. (2008, October) benchmarking Amazon
EC2 for high-performance scientific
computing. Retrieved from http//www.usenix.org/pu
blications/login/2008-10/openpdfs/walker.pdf
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Materials Science Case Study
54 relaxation calculations, 25 and 32 atoms
(C,N,O,H), standard convergence criterion
(Espresso-4.0.5 with MKL 10 and gfortran/gcc
4.3.3)
Worst 58 Best   69
Worst 53 Best   57
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Getting Started with StarCluster
Point your web browser to http//web.mit.edu/starc
luster
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AWS Funding Opportunities...
The AWS in Education program offers

• Teaching Grants for educators using AWS in
  courses (plus access to selected course content
  resources)
• Research Grants for academic researchers using
  AWS in their work
• Project Grants for student organizations
  pursuing entrepreneurial endeavors Tutorials for
  students that want to use AWS for self-directed
  learning
• Solutions for university administrators looking
  to use cloud computing to be more efficient and
  cost-effective in the university's IT
  Infrastructure

Learn more about AWS in Education programs
http//aws.amazon.com/education/
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Acknowledgements

• Professor Buehler (MIT)
• Professor Marzari (MIT)
• Constantinos Evangelinos (MIT)
• Nicolas Poilvert
• Nicolas Pinto (MIT)
• Amazon Web Services

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Thanks for coming! Any questions?