[Starcluster] Configure cluster with lam/mpi?

[Justin Riley]

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Hi Jun-Wei,

StarCluster currently comes with OpenMPI 1.3.2 so it's hard to tell if
the results/conclusions from that paper are still valid without
re-running their tests.

With that said, we've chosen OpenMPI because it's the successor of LAM
and is also provided by the default Ubuntu package repository. It also
comes with support for integrating with Sun Grid Engine. These things
combined make OpenMPI much more attractive from a packaging/support
perspective.

However, StarCluster does not limit you to using OpenMPI provided you're
willing to install LAM yourself. You *should* be able to install LAM by
launching an instance of the StarCluster AMI, removing OpenMPI and
installing LAM, and then re-bundling the AMI. Here are some detailed
instructions:

1. launch a single instance of the StarCluster AMI with ElasticFox or
the AWS management console

2. Log into this instance as root and run the following command to
uninstall OpenMPI:

$ apt-get remove libopenmpi-dbg libopenmpi-dev \
libopenmpi1.3openmpi-bin openmpi-common openmpi-doc

3. Download and install LAM on the instance manually

4. Log out of the instance and use StarCluster's createimage command, e.g:

$ starcluster createimage i-99999 mybucket myimagename

5. Use the newly created AMI id in one of your cluster templates in the
config file.

6. Launch a cluster using that cluster template and give it a shot

If you decide to go this route please keep the list informed on your
progress. If you're successful and find the performance to be better
I'll consider making a separate AMI for LAM and posting it on the website.

Hope that helps,

~Justin

On 06/02/2010 01:27 PM, Huang, Jun-Wei wrote:
> Hello:
> I have followed the StarCluster's documentation and created a small
> cluster successfully. I notice that only openmpi is available on the
> virtual cluster. According to the abstract by Constantinos Evangelinos
> and Chris Hill (2008), they found openmpi 1.2.6 does not work and
> lam/mpi has the lowest latency. My question is that are their
> observations still hold true for the virtual cluster created using
> StarCluster? If so, what is the way to add lam/mpi implementation to the
> virtual cluster. Thank you very much.
> 
> Best wishes,
> Junwei
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Starcluster mailing list
> Starcluster at mit.edu
> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/starcluster

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