[Starcluster] WebFeedback - cluster: Hi again I guess it s better to use this than email Here s ... [help.mit.edu #1142117]

[Justin Riley]

Hi Rob,

If you wouldn't mind, I'd prefer to use the starcluster 
(http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/starcluster) mailing list for 
reporting any issues/questions you might have in the future.

Concerning your question, I'm guessing you mean is there a way to download the 
StarHPC AMI as a standalone virtual machine image? If so, I know that you can 
download the individual virtual machine files from S3 (ie the parts of the 
volume created by ec2-bundle-vol and the likes) but I've never tried to unpack 
them and get the vm running within a local Xen installation. 

This is not to say it couldn't be done, but I certainly don't have any 
experience with this. Regardless, the amount of money you'd save not storing a 
10GB AMI on S3 you'd likely spend on the data transfer into S3 every time you 
wanted to launch the AMI. Furthermore, the process of transferring the image 
to s3, registering the AMI, and then launching the instance would make for an 
insanely long boot time. Honestly, I don't see the benefit.

I typically do things the old fashioned way (launch instance, customize, 
rebundle) and also utilize EBS for housing research/application data and also 
applications themselves. Amazon allows you to create EBS volumes up to 1TB 
each. You can then mount these volumes to the instance. Starcluster supports 
this btw and nfs's the mounted EBS volume to all the nodes. Have a look at the 
docs if you're interested in using this.

Interestingly enough, EC2 recently added support for booting from an EBS 
volume which opens up the amount of data that can be stored on an instance/AMI 
(up to 1TB). This feature is not available in the current stable version of 
StarCluster. Needless to say, I'll be experimenting with this in the very near 
future.

Hope that helps,

~Justin


On Monday 01 February 2010 12:26:56 pm rentzsch at biochem.ucl.ac.uk via RT 
wrote:
> Mon Feb 01 12:26:55 2010: Request 1142117 was acted upon.
> Transaction: Ticket created by rentzsch at biochem.ucl.ac.uk
>        Queue: StarIssues
>      Subject: WebFeedback - cluster: Hi again I guess it s better to use
>  this than email Here s ... Owner: Nobody
>   Requestors: rentzsch at biochem.ucl.ac.uk
>       Status: new
>  Ticket <URL: https://help.mit.edu/Ticket/Display.html?id=1142117 >
> 
> 
> 
> Star WebFeedback
> Time: Mon Feb  1 12:26:56 2010
> Name: Rob
> Project: cluster
> Source: web
> Report: Question
> Email: rentzsch at biochem.ucl.ac.uk
> Subscribe: on
> Note: Hi again,
> 
> I guess it's better to use this than email?
> 
> Here's a more general question: is the unbundled StarCluster AMI available
>  from somewhere or will be? I might want to customize the AMI a bit
>  (software and maybe even some input data since I think an AMI can be 10
>  Gigs = using that could save S3 space?) and be able to to this 'offline'
>  i.e. mount it on my local machine.
> 
> Don't worry if not, I'll try to do it the 'online' way then
>  (edit&rebundle).
> 
> Cheers,
> Rob
>