===================
StarCluster v0.95.6
:StarCluster: Cluster Computing Toolkit for the Cloud
:Version: 0.95.6
:Author: Justin Riley justin.t.riley@gmail.com
:Team: Software Tools for Academics and Researchers (http://star.mit.edu)
:Homepage: http://star.mit.edu/cluster
:License: LGPL
.. image:: https://secure.travis-ci.org/jtriley/StarCluster.png?branch=develop
:target: https://secure.travis-ci.org/jtriley/StarCluster
.. image:: https://pypip.in/d/StarCluster/badge.png
:target: https://crate.io/packages/StarCluster
Description:
StarCluster is a utility for creating and managing computing clusters hosted on
Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). StarCluster utilizes Amazon's EC2 web
service to create and destroy clusters of Linux virtual machines on demand.
All that's needed to create your own cluster(s) on Amazon EC2 is an AWS account
and StarCluster. StarCluster features:
- Simple configuration - with examples ready to go out-of-the-box
- Create/Manage Clusters - simple start command to automatically launch
and configure one or more clusters on EC2 - Automated Cluster Setup - includes NFS-sharing, Open Grid Scheduler
queuing system, Condor, password-less ssh between machines, and more - Scientific Computing AMI - comes with Ubuntu 11.10-based EBS-backed AMI
that contains Hadoop, OpenMPI, ATLAS, LAPACK, NumPy, SciPy, IPython, and
other useful libraries - EBS Volume Sharing - easily NFS-share Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS)
volumes across a cluster for persistent storage - EBS-Backed Clusters - start and stop EBS-backed clusters on EC2
- Cluster Compute Instances - support for "cluster compute" instance types
- Expand/Shrink Clusters - scale a cluster by adding or removing nodes
- Elastic Load Balancing - automatically shrink or expand a cluster based
on Open Grid Scheduler queue statistics - Plugin Support - allows users to run additional setup routines on the
cluster after StarCluster's defaults. Comes with plugins for IPython
parallel+notebook, Condor, Hadoop, MPICH2, MySQL cluster, installing Ubuntu
packages, and more.
Interested? See the getting started_ section for more details.
.. _getting started:
Getting Started:
Install StarCluster using easy_install::
$ easy_install StarCluster
or using pip::
$ pip install StarCluster
or manually::
$ (Download StarCluster from http://star.mit.edu/cluster/downloads.html)
$ tar xvzf starcluster-X.X.X.tar.gz (where x.x.x is a version number)
$ cd starcluster-X.X.X
$ sudo python setup.py install
After the software has been installed, the next step is to setup the
configuration file::
$ starcluster help
StarCluster - (http://star.mit.edu/cluster)
Software Tools for Academics and Researchers (STAR)
Please submit bug reports to starcluster@mit.edu
!!! ERROR - config file /home/user/.starcluster/config does not exist
Options:
--------
[1] Show the StarCluster config template
[2] Write config template to /home/user/.starcluster/config
[q] Quit
Please enter your selection:
Select the second option by typing 2 and pressing enter. This will give you a
template to use to create a configuration file containing your AWS credentials,
cluster settings, etc. The next step is to customize this file using your
favorite text-editor::
$ vi ~/.starcluster/config
This file is commented with example "cluster templates". A cluster template
defines a set of configuration settings used to start a new cluster. The
example config provides a smallcluster template that is ready to go
out-of-the-box. However, first, you must fill in your AWS credentials and
keypair info::
[aws info]
aws_access_key_id = #your aws access key id here
aws_secret_access_key = #your secret aws access key here
aws_user_id = #your 12-digit aws user id here
The next step is to fill in your keypair information. If you don't already have
a keypair you can create one from StarCluster using::
$ starcluster createkey mykey -o ~/.ssh/mykey.rsa
This will create a keypair called mykey on Amazon EC2 and save the private
key to ~/.ssh/mykey.rsa. Once you have a key the next step is to fill-in your
keypair info in the StarCluster config file::
[key key-name-here]
key_location = /path/to/your/keypair.rsa
For example, the section for the keypair created above using the createkey
command would look like::
[key mykey]
key_location = ~/.ssh/mykey.rsa
After defining your keypair in the config, the next step is to update the
default cluster template smallcluster with the name of your keypair on EC2::
[cluster smallcluster]
keyname = key-name-here
For example, the smallcluster template would be updated to look like::
[cluster smallcluster]
keyname = mykey
Now that the config file has been set up we're ready to start using
StarCluster. Next we start a cluster named "mycluster" using the default
cluster template smallcluster in the example config::
$ starcluster start mycluster
The default_template setting in the [global] section of the config
specifies the default cluster template and is automatically set to
smallcluster in the example config.
After the start command completes you should now have a working cluster.
You can login to the master node as root by running::
$ starcluster sshmaster mycluster
You can also copy files to/from the cluster using the put and get
commands. To copy a file or entire directory from your local computer to the
cluster::
$ starcluster put mycluster /path/to/local/file/or/dir /remote/path/
To copy a file or an entire directory from the cluster to your local computer::
$ starcluster get mycluster /path/to/remote/file/or/dir /local/path/
Once you've finished using the cluster and wish to stop paying for it::
$ starcluster terminate mycluster
Have a look at the rest of StarCluster's available commands::
$ starcluster --help
Dependencies:
- Amazon AWS Account
- Python 2.6+
- Boto 2.23.0+
- Paramiko 1.12.1+
- WorkerPool 0.9.2
- Jinja2 2.7
- decorator 3.4.0+
- iptools 0.6.1+
- optcomplete 1.2-devel+
- PyCrypto 2.5+
- scp 0.7.1+
- iso8601 0.1.8+
Learn more...
Watch an ~8 minute screencast @ http://star.mit.edu/cluster
To learn more have a look at the documentation:
http://star.mit.edu/cluster/docs/latest
Community
StarCluster has a mailing list for users and developers:
http://star.mit.edu/cluster/mailinglist.html
Join our IRC channel #starcluster on freenode. If you do not have an IRC client
you can join the #starcluster channel using your web browser:
http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=starcluster
Licensing
StarCluster is licensed under the LGPLv3
See COPYING.LESSER (LGPL) and COPYING (GPL) for LICENSE details