[Starcluster] UPDATE: New public AMIs available

[Justin Riley]

Hi All,

As you might have read in the previous discussion thread, both of the public 
x86 and x86_64 StarCluster AMIs have been mysteriously deleted from Amazon S3. 
I'm in the process of determining what happened to those images and I 
apologize to all of you for any inconveniences this may have caused.

With that said I've created two replacement Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 StarCluster 
AMIs in both x86 and x86_64 flavors:

x86: ami-8f9e71e6
x86_64: ami-a19e71c8

These new images should contain all of the software from the old image plus 
numpy-1.3.0/scipy-0.7.1 compiled against an optimized atlas install 
(lapack/blas), as well as custom compiled umfpack/amd and fftw libraries. I've 
also added the python-drmaa package to the AMI for controlling Sun Grid Engine 
jobs from python.

Atlas was compiled on EC2 against the high CPU instance for x86_64 and the 
"highest" CPU instance for x86 (c1.medium).

Please test these new images and let me know how it goes. If all goes well I 
will post these new images ids on the StarCluster website tomorrow.

Also, to avoid this situation in the future I now have a backup of the new 
public AMIs on our servers at MIT which is also backed up daily. If anyone's 
interested I would be willing to provide these images for download in iso form 
on the website. This is also useful for local development of new AMIs based on 
StarCluster's original image as Robert Rentzch pointed out to me in a previous 
thread. This is how I'm developing new AMIs from now on.

Thanks,

~Justin