[StarCluster] Using a hi-I/O instance as the master node in a StarCluster Cluster

[Oppe, Thomas C ERDC-RDE-ITL-MS Contractor]

Paolo and Dustin,



Thank you for the information, especially for the new commands "fdisk -l" and "mount -l" and the link to the discussion of this question.  I found the SSD volumes and was able to format and mount them.  I am eager to try this instance as the master node in my HYCOM serial I/O runs once I am granted permission to use AWS again.



The link also clarifies whether I should use "ext2", "ext3", or "ext4" for formatting the drives.  Use "mount -l" to find out.  I was previously guessing and trying various formats.



Tom Oppe

________________________________
From: Paolo Di Tommaso [paolo.ditommaso at crg.eu]
Sent: Saturday, January 05, 2013 4:05 AM
To: Dustin Machi
Cc: Oppe, Thomas C ERDC-RDE-ITL-MS Contractor; starcluster at mit.edu
Subject: Re: [StarCluster] Using a hi-I/O instance as the master node in a StarCluster Cluster

Hi there,

The two SSD disks are available as ephemeral volumes, BUT unlike other instance types they are NOT mounted by default.

This means that you have to format and mount by yourself.

You may be interested to this thread

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=390415#390415



Best,
Paolo




On Jan 4, 2013, at 5:44 PM, Dustin Machi <dmachi at vbi.vt.edu<mailto:dmachi at vbi.vt.edu>> wrote:

I've never messed with them on AWS, but I assume that these get mounted
wherever the local disks get mounted normally.../mnt.  The hi1.4xlarge
should have two 1tb volumes mounted
(http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/07/new-high-io-ec2-instance-type-hi14xlarge.html)
or available to mount (fdisk -l).  The don't think the IOPS provisioning
will matter much here (for the the read/writes to those volumes anyway),
though they may impact the performance of the EBS volume itself of
course.

Dustin

On 4 Jan 2013, at 11:06, Oppe, Thomas C ERDC-RDE-ITL-MS Contractor
wrote:

Dear Sir:



I was wondering if anyone has tried using a high-performance I/O
instance (e.g., "hi1.4xlarge") as the master node in a StarCluster
cluster, with the other nodes being Sandy Bridge "cc2.8xlarge"
instances.  When I bring up a single "hi1.4xlarge" instance outside of
StarCluster, there is an option to attach one or two 1-TB SSD disks,
but when I bring up a cluster with "hi1.4xlarge" as the master node,
the SSD disks are nowhere to be found.  Is a plug-in necessary to ask
for the SSD disks to be available?  I have a code that needs the
fastest I/O available for writes with a combined size of 100GB during
the run.  I have tried single Standard and Provisioned IOPS EBS
volumes, but the I/O performance to these volumes is poor, even with
"pre-warming".  Has anyone written a plug-in for using striped volumes
in StarCluster?  I would appreciate any comments or pointers to
information.



Tom Oppe
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