Flight Appliance Documentation - 2017.2r1

This site holds documentation designed to help users create a simple research compute environment using popular public and private cloud platforms. As well as launching and accessing the environment, guides and tutorials are included to help end-users install software applications, manage their data and run different workloads.

License

This documentation is released under the Creative-Commons: Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. The Alces Flight Compute software is released under the terms of the Alces Flight EULA. Please read the relevant license text before proceeding to use.

Prerequisites

We recommend that users wishing to use Flight Appliances have basic Linux skills. The ability to move about in a filesystem, copy and delete files, read and edit files on the command-line will be needed in order to get the best out of the Flight software.

Using your Flight Compute cluster

• Getting started as quickly as possible
• What’s New
• What is Alces Flight Compute Solo?
• Prerequisites
• Where can I get help?

Launching your cluster

• Launching on AWS
• Launching on OpenStack
• Launching on IBM SoftLayer

Using your cluster

• Basic cluster operation
• Working with data and files
• Home Directory Synchronization
• Graphical desktop access to your login node
• Cluster VPN

Software applications

• Software Applications
• Parallel (MPI) Applications
• Using Gridware with Docker
• Using Gridware with Singularity

Cluster job schedulers

• Cluster job schedulers
• Slurm Scheduler
• Open Grid Scheduler (SGE)
• OpenLava Scheduler
• TORQUE Scheduler
• PBS Pro Scheduler

Customising your cluster

• Cluster Configuration Options
• Cluster customisation: AWS
• Launching a single Alces Flight instance on AWS
• Launching Alces Flight on AWS using a CloudFormation template
• Example AWS CloudFormation template
• Disabling resource limits for your job-scheduler

Available software packages

• Alces Gridware Software Applications

Example workflows

• Working with Gridware Applications: R
• Working with Gridware Applications: Perl
• Working with Gridware Applications: Python
• Using OpenFoam with Alces Flight Compute
• Using NAMD with Alces Flight Compute