Amazon Machine Image of Parallel SECONDO
The powerful computing resources provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) make it possible for the users to build up their virtual clusters without purchasing physical hardware. Thereby, a Parallel SECONDO AMI (Amazon Machine Image) 1.2 is published on the Amazon public AMI list, being assigned the id ami-f3167d9a, and helping the users to explore the system on the Amazon cloud. Note that in order to use this AMI, an Amazon account is required.
There are two ways of starting Parallel SECONDO on AWS EC2 instances:
Parallel SECONDO on a Single EC2 Instance
Starting a single EC2 instance containing Parallel SECONDO is very easy. The user only needs to follow the instructions of this link, all within the browser-based console dashboard provided by Amazon.
Parallel SECONDO on an EC2 Virtual Cluster
It is possible that the user sets up a virtual cluster by renting a number of EC2 instances from AWS, and then installs Parallel SECONDO with the installation scripts. However, it is a little bit complicated for new users who are not familiar with Parallel SECONDO, neither with AWS.
In order to help the user to set up an EC2 cluster quickly with a Parallel SECONDO being prepared, a bash script ps-ec2-startInstances is provided. With it, the user can create the cluster simply by a command like:
$ ps-ec2-startInstances -n 5 -g PSGroup
Here a cluster consisting of five EC2 instances is created. One instance is used as the master, and all five instances are used as slaves. The PSGroup is a security group created in AWS earlier. More details about using Parallel SECONDO in AWS are explained in Example: How to Set Up Parallel SECONDO on AWS EC2.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful for the research grant provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Education, which supports our study on EC2.
