Re: Using Starcluster with micro instances?

From: Justin Riley <no email>
Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2012 18:05:21 -0500

Yep, I use them all the time but only for StarCluster development where
I'm constantly starting/stopping clusters. However, even in these cases
you have to be careful. The instances run out of memory *very* easily -
using a ton of plugins can easily make them run out of memory and/or
drastically spike the CPU load. An interesting side-effect of using a
lot of plugins on a t1.micro cluster is that because the CPU is heavily
throttled the "load" on the system spikes very easily which can lead to
SGE/OGS jobs not being executed until the system load goes below the
SGE/OGS load threshold which can take between 5-10min. Just something
to keep in mind when using the t1.micro instance type...

~Justin

On Thu 05 Jan 2012 05:56:28 PM EST, Rayson Ho wrote:
> Thanks Justin. I launched a 2-node StarCluster with micro instances using the Ubuntu 11.10 EBS AMI yesterday and it worked pretty well.
>
> t1.micro is perfect for testing, esp. with the free tier one can hack StarCluster for a year without spending any $$ at all! :-D
>
>
> http://aws.amazon.com/free/
>
>
> Rayson
>
> =================================
> Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine
> http://gridscheduler.sourceforge.net/
>
> Scalable Grid Engine Support Program
> http://www.scalablelogic.com/
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Justin Riley <jtriley_at_mit.edu>
> To: Nicolas Pinto <nicolas.pinto_at_gmail.com>
> Cc: starcluster <starcluster_at_mit.edu>
> Sent: Thursday, January 5, 2012 11:46 AM
> Subject: Re: [StarCluster] Using Starcluster with micro instances?
>
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>
> Just following up, there are new Ubuntu 11.10 EBS volumes available
> that should be compatible with t1.micro. That being said, t1.micro's
> are not well-suited for any serious cluster computing (1/2 of a
> heavily throttled CPU core and 500MB RAM...) so I wouldn't recommend
> using them except to test on the cheap....
>
> ~Justin
>
>
> On 10/03/2011 12:07 PM, Nicolas Pinto wrote:
>> Cc'ing the mailing list.
>>
>> On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 12:18 AM, Nicolas Pinto
>> <nicolas.pinto_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Quick question from:
>>> http://forum.cs264.org/index.php?topic=411.0
>>>
>>> There seems to be an issue when trying t1.micro with StarCluster
>>> AMIs, e.g.:
>>>
>>> % ec2-run-instances -key kp ami-bf5eb9d6 -t t1.micro
>>> Client.UnsupportedOperation: AMI 'ami-bf5eb9d6' with an
>>> instance-store root device is not supported for the instance type
>>> 't1.micro'.
>>>
>>> I'm having the same issue.
>>
>>
>>
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Received on Thu Jan 05 2012 - 18:05:24 EST