[Starcluster] Version of StartCluster with support for Amazon Cluster Compute Images

[Fred Rotbart]

I have built a StarCluster Cluster Compute AMI based on the Rightscale 
CentOS hvm image. It turns out that the Rightscale image did not add 
anything relevant to StarCluster over the generic Amazon one so I could 
used that one instead.
The image is ami-30b84d59 and has been made public.

The image also includes PLAPACK version 3.2 and PETSc 3.1-p4 together 
with matching mpi4py and petsc4py.

On starting up in a StarCluster, the image also exhibits the error 
message "mount -t rpc_pipefs sunrpc /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs/" that Dan 
Yamins reported in 
http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/starcluster/2010-August/000337.html.
Likewise it does not seem to affect the running of the cluster.

The cookbook is available in 
https://docs.google.com/a/dius.com.au/document/pub?id=1ztxOMQZbC5xiCYVRO6IVxqoi81CPdbjxA3FdueyYMsY

Note my cookbook generates full config files rather than the more 
elegant dynamically editing them.

The Cluster Compute cluster seems to work very well without the flaky 
mpi behavior that normal Amazon images exhibit.

- Fred

On 31/08/10 17:22 , Fred Rotbart wrote:
>    I have cloned the StarCluster git repository to
> http://github.com/fcr/StarCluster and added support for the Amazon
> Cluster Computer instances.
> This has been tested with boto-2.0b2 and with the Amazon generic Cluster
> Compute hvm AMI ami-7ea24a17 (which is not, of course, StarCluster ready)
>
> The "start" command has a new feature that if the -x  option is used, it
> will restart a stopped one.
> The "stop" command will stop rather than terminate ebs backed instances
> (if they are not spot instances).
> A new 'terminate" command has been added to actually terminate a running
> or stopped cluster.
>
> Please feel free to try it out and let me know if there are any problems.
>
> Next challenge is going to be building a StarCluster hvm compatible
> image. If anyone has done this, please let know.
>
> - Fred
>