Cloud At Sara
SARA in the CLOUD
by Pjotr Prins, Wageningen University, Dept. of Nematology
The super computing center SARA in Amsterdam has a pilot in CLOUD computing in which I participate as a tester. Here I quickly document my experiences over november 2009.
The setup consists of five dual-quad CPU's - i.e. 40 cores (additional to Nematology/Bioinformatics 24 cores' in my 'CLOUD') available for some hard hitting on top of Ubuntu with KVM. SARA supplies a few images and documentation.
SSH
The login to the control server (named ui) is via:
ssh -XC user@ui.grid.sara.nl ssh -XC user@ui.claudia.sara.nl
Easiest to provide a tunnel, say
ssh -L 20201:ui.claudia.sara.nl:22 -f -N user@ui.grid.sara.nl
And now you can ssh and scp etc. directly through
ssh -p 20201 user@localhost
easiest to setup a key too. On your local machine:
ssh-keygen -t dsa
and add the content of ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub to the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file on UI (and later any images) as described here. Using ssh keys allows you to login without typing passwords every time.
UI commands
A number of commands are listed on the CLAUDIA wiki listed above. Additionally
for x in 0 1 2 3 4 5 ; do echo -n $x :; onehost show $x | grep USEDCPU ; done
0 :USEDCPU=0.799999999999955 1 :USEDCPU=0.799999999999955 2 :USEDCPU=0.799999999999955 3 :USEDCPU=0.799999999999955 4 :USEDCPU=3.20000000000005 5 :USEDCPU=1.60000000000002
You can see the CLOUD is not busy. Currently there are two types of images running:
user@ui:~$ onevm list ID NAME STAT CPU MEM HOSTNAME TIME 193 vm_cloud runn 0 4194304 host05 05 21:02:00 194 ubuntu-9 runn 0 2097152 host01 02 23:07:56 195 ubuntu-9 runn 0 2097152 host02 02 02:38:10 200 debian runn 0 2097152 host03 01 19:36:52 201 debian runn 0 2097152 host06 01 19:14:56 202 ubuntu-9 runn 0 2097152 host04 01 17:40:53 203 ubuntu-9 runn 0 2097152 host06 01 17:40:52 204 ubuntu-9 runn 0 2097152 host05 01 17:40:50
Current images are:
user@ui:~$ ls /data/images/ debian-503-i386-CD-1.iso scilin5.3-10G.img ubuntu-9.10-10G.img debian-lenny-10G.img ttylinux.img ubuntu-9.10-server-i386.iso
These are 32-bit images. A 64-bit image I have to make myself - will do that a bit later. First and foremost I am a Debian-guy, so the first bit is easy. Copy the image to use your own - you don't want to update a shared image:
cp /data/images/debian-lenny-10G.img ~
copy and edit the template to match:
cp /data/templates/debian-lenny-10G.template ~ vi ~/debian-lenny-10G.template
First I rename my image
cp debian-lenny-10G.img debian-lenny-default-32.img cp debian-lenny-10G.template debian-lenny-default-32.template
I am greedy so I grab all CPU's (8) and a little more RAM. The diff is
< CPU = 1 < MEMORY = 2048 --- > CPU = 8 > MEMORY = 4096 < source = "/data/images/debian-lenny-10G.img", --- > source = "/home/cloud10/debian-lenny-default32.img",
and
onevm create debian-lenny-default-32.template onevm list 205 cloud10 debian fail 0 0 host03 00 00:00:09
not good. I had used the wrong name for source. The log can be found in
cat /var/log/one/205.log
Try again and it reads:
206 cloud10 debian runn 0 0 host03 00 00:00:42
and, yes! it is running on host03. Now you know the ID you can get extra info with
onvm show 206
which gives the IP etc.
ssh cloud@145.100.5.248 Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by applicable law. Last login: Tue Nov 3 06:17:28 2009 cloud@debian:~$
cool. That looks good. 'top' shows 4 Gb of RAM, 'df' shows I have 8.5 Gb of disk space. Only problem is I have one CPU! So delete the previous VM
onevm delete 206