Launching Alces Flight on AWS using a CloudFormation template

Using AWS Marketplace is a convenient method to launch your Alces Flight cluster, using a pre-defined template that collect common configuration options for an HPC compute cluster. For advanced users, it is also possible to launch individual instances from the Alces Flight AMI - for more details, see - Launching a single Alces Flight instance on AWS.

Users can also create their own CloudFormation templates to launch different cluster configurations. While a base knowledge of CloudFormation is required, this method is often preferable to configuring individual instances as it allows clusters to be repeatably launched once a customized template has been created.

Alces provides a number of example templates that are intended to assist users in generating their own templates. The templates below use the Flight AMI from AWS Marketplace to build your cluster - users are encouraged to review these templates with an aim to launching their own, customised environments.

Example AWS CloudFormation templates

8-node, 16-node and 32-node fixed-size clusters

This template is designed to create an 8-node cluster, and provides a choice of compute and login node instance types. The template creates:

  • A VPC, subnet and gateway for the cluster
  • An on-demand login node with EBS (Magnetic) storage
  • 8, 16 or 32 compute nodes of on-demand or spot type in an autoscaling group

Variable sized cluster

This template is designed to create a cluster of between 1 and 32 nodes, and provides a choice of compute and login node instance types. The template creates:

  • A VPC, subnet and gateway for the cluster
  • An on-demand login node with EBS (Magnetic) storage
  • A choice of compute nodes of on-demand or spot type in an autoscaling group

Demonstration cluster

This template is designed to create a cluster of between 1 and 32 nodes, with higher performance SSD-backed EBS storage (sg2) and all software repositories enabled for demonstration purposes. The template creates:

  • A VPC, subnet and gateway for the cluster
  • An on-demand login node with SSD-backed EBS (sg2) storage
  • A choice of compute nodes of on-demand type
  • Both the main and volatile software repositories enabled