[StarCluster] Setting a spot bid

[Benjamin Lambert]

Hi StarCluster folks,

I just came across StarCluster last week.  We've been having some trouble with a local physical SGE cluster, and I needed a backup/replacement.  I made the mistake of trying to set up an existing Ubuntu AMI to work in StarCluster, without knowing what I was getting in to.  But once I gave up on that and started fresh from the default SG Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit image, I got things up and running smoothly.  Very nice work!

I'm looking forward to the features planned for version 0.92, especially elastic load balancing, add/remove nodes, and EBS-backed AMIs.  Any estimate when we might see 0.92?

I am having a slight issue with bidding for spot instances.  It works just fine if I request it through the command line:
starcluster start --bid=0.50 cluster

But, if I put the bid in my .starcluster/config file like so:
[cluster medium]
KEYNAME = ...
SPOT_BID = 0.35
...
I get the error:
>>> Using default cluster template: medium
>>> Validating cluster template settings...
cluster.py:766 - ERROR - spot_bid must be integer or float
cli.py:243 - ERROR - settings for cluster template "medium" are not valid

Is the way I've specified this wrong?  Or perhaps, it's being loaded as a string and isn't getting converted to a float internally?

Cheers,

Ben


Benjamin Lambert
Ph.D. Student of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
www.cs.cmu.edu/~belamber
Mobile: 617-869-1844