[petsc-users] installation on cloud platform

[Barry Smith]

  Marco,

  There are competitors to the "regular" cloud machines like Amazon focused specifically  on HPC that "come with" MPI and use high speed networks so are much like if you built a custom HPC machine. For example http://www.rescale.com/software/  

   I don't have direct experiences with any of these systems but suspect that if you really want to scale to a bunch of nodes you are likely far better off with the HPC cloud servers than with general purpose systems even if they have a higher cost (you get what you pay for).

  Barry



> On Jan 4, 2016, at 4:48 PM, Marco Zocca <zocca.marco at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Satish,
> 
> thank you for the input;
> 
> I was really looking for something that lets one abstract out "where"
> the code lives, so as to possibly work both in a single-node and
> cluster setting.
> 
> This is why a "container" approach sounds meaningful. Configure once, run many.
> For message-passing codes such as our case, there's this
> `docker-compose` [ https://docs.docker.com/compose ] which aggregates
> the compilation and network setup steps.
> I have found this approach [
> http://qnib.org/2015/04/14/qnibterminal-mpi-hello-world/ ] that runs
> an MPI benchmark using `docker-compose`. The "Consul" library takes
> care of the DNS resolution as far as I can tell, and SLURM is the
> queue manager.
> 
> The downsides: it's yet another third party tool (albeit a widespread
> one), with yet another scripting syntax (very much similar but
> incompatible with shell script).
> Latencies will be much larger, I expect, and also one should pay a
> much higher attention to security (building on top of someone else's
> images, freely available from the Docker Hub, is tantamount to running
> arbitrary code at compile time).
> 
> There are however trusted Docker images, containing various
> combinations of Linux distributions and software.
> 
> I'm very much looking forward to continuing this discussion;
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Marco
> 
> 
> 
>> Are you interested in using 1 node [with multiple cores] - or multiple
>> nodes - aka cluster on amazon?
>> 
>> For a single node - I don't think any additional config should be
>> necesary [/etc/hosts - or ssh keys]. It should be same as any laptop
>> config.
>> 
>> Its possible that 'hostname' is not setup properly on amazon nodes - and
>> MPICH misbehaves.  In this case - you might need any entry to
>> /etc/hosts. Perhaps something like:
>> 
>> echo 127.0.0.1 `hostname` >> /etc/hosts
>> 
>> If cluster - then there might be a tutorial to setup a proper cluster with AWS. Googles gives
>> http://cs.smith.edu/dftwiki/index.php/Tutorial:_Create_an_MPI_Cluster_on_the_Amazon_Elastic_Cloud_%28EC2%29
>> 
>> BTW: --download-mpich is a convient way to install MPI. [we default to
>> device=ch3:sock]. But you might want to figureout if there is a better
>> performing MPI for the amazon config.  [perhaps mpich with nemesis
>> works well. Or perhaps openmpi. Both are available prebuit on
>> ubunutu...]
>> 
>> Satish
>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>>      has anyone here tried/managed to install PETSc on e.g. Amazon AWS or
>>>>>    the Google Compute Engine?
>>>>> 
>>>>>    I believe some extra components are needed for coordination, e.g.
>>>>>    Kubernetes or Mesos (in turn requiring that the library be compiled
>>>>>    within some sort of container, e.g. Docker), but I'm a bit lost amid
>>>>>    all the options.