Launching Alces Flight on AWS using a CloudFormation template

Using AWS CloudFormation console 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 (CFN) 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 a published Flight AMI to build your cluster - users are encouraged to review these templates with an aim to launching their own, customised environments.

Example AWS CloudFormation template

This AWS CloudFormation template is designed to create a Flight Solo cluster in the AWS region of your choice, including:

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

https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/openflighthpc/templates/solo-cluster.yaml