Commercial Resources
Commercial on-demand computational resources
Penguin Computing on Demand (POD) provides you HPC resources for which you pay-as-you-go. You don't need to own a powerful cluster to run your jobs even at large scale. POD's compute environment was designed specifically for high-performance computing and features typical HPC components such as low-latency interconnects and GPUs. For optimum performance all jobs are managed by industry leading HPC schedulers that support the job submission semantics of the open source scheduler TORQUE. All jobs are executed directly on POD HPC servers without a virtualization layer in the middle which provides similar environment as CWRU High Performance Computing (HPC) Cluster. Visit POD website for details.
POD Portal
Beyond offering an easy-to-use HPC compute cloud environment, POD provides centralized management capabilities through the POD portal. It also allows users to complete job submission process through a web interface. Refer to POD User Documentation for details.
POD offers easy registration. It requires a valid credit card but it is not charged when selecting free usage tier by submitting the job in a FREE queue (#PBS -q FREE) that includes resources as Intel 2.9GHz Westmere 1248GB 24 Cores for 5 Minutes. For more pricing and queue information, visit POD Cloud Rates and Services and for POD Job Queue.
Pre-installed applications are available via module commands as in CWRU HPC. Find the details for accessing applications here.
Job Submission Options
POD Tools: It enables job submission and queries without first logging into a POD login node.
ScyId Insight: It provides option to submit jobs through web interface from POD Portal. While in POD portal, (i) Launch ScyId Insight button on the left pane, (ii) click on new job, (iii) transfer/upload the required files from your PC, (iv) create and submit a job using job submitter GUI, and (v) download output files.
POD CLI: Submitting the job through bash script from the command line as in CWRU HPC.
Refer to this documentation for details.
Amazon AWS provides a stack of cloud computing web services that provide customizable, on-demand computational resources in the cloud. It is designed to accommodate bursty, on-demand computing by eliminating the complexity of building a significant hardware investment upfront.
One pager: [U]Tech Specific Guide on AWS Resources for Researchers
Presentation Slides: Review of AWS use by Researchers at CWRU -- from 6 March 2018 presentation
Note: For creating AWS account, please contact HelpDesk with attention to Amazon Web Services.
Create an access to AWS Account
Click on create an AWS account
If you already have amazon account, use that credential else click on Sign-in Using our Secure Server
Sign in to amazon and go to My Account for your Account ID that you need to use for AWS Educate.
Create an account for AWS Educate
Click on "Apply for AWS Educate for Educators/Students
Fill it up. You need the Account ID.
You will get email,once your application is approved and you will have access to Amazon Webservice Portal
Training
http://www.lynda.com/search?q=AWS
Follow the hands-on training at:http://casewestern.awsdemo.info/
Also saved at Desktop
High Performance Computing Service
Amazon AWS provides Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) cluster resources as their generic offering. Customers with complex computational workloads such as tightly coupled parallel processes, or with applications sensitive to network performance, can achieve the same high compute and network performance while benefiting from the elasticity, flexibility and cost advantages of Amazon EC2. Cluster Compute, Cluster GPU, and High Memory Cluster instances have been specifically engineered to provide high-performance network capability and can be programmatically launched into clusters – allowing applications to get the low-latency network performance required for tightly coupled, node-to-node communication. Please note that Amazon EC2 runs on virtualized environment.
Besides the generic EC2, Amazon AWS also provide many other types of specialized computational resources such as Relational Database Service (RDS), Redshift, Elastic MapReduce, and so on.
To use Amazon AWS services, a potential user needs to create a free Amazon Web Service (AWS) account and also has to submit the payment method (a credit card for any possible incurred fees. This AWS account can be used to access any AWS services, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic MapReduce, Relational Database Service (RDS), Simple Storage Service (S3), and Glacier. AWS also provides an identity and access management (IAM) console that can let you add groups of existing AWS users with certain administrative and executive privileges. This control access mechanism allows a research group at CWRU to have multiple AWS users of group members without worrying about limited or compromised access.
Storage and Archival Service
Amazon has a couple of tightly-coupled storage systems that work well with EC2 resources, i.e. the EBS (Elastic Block Storage) and the S3 (Simple Storage Service). The EBS is typically bundled with the EC2 purchase, while S3 can also be an independent storage reservation.
The lowest-priced archival storage provide by Amazon is the Amazon Glacier, priced at $120/TB/year. Please note that this price would increase significantly each time the users need to retrieve the data. A user also needs to maintain a permanent client that reflects the Glacier file structure, because retrieving the storage file structure for the latest snapshot would take several hours. The very nice thing about this service is the natural contingency protection against data lost. This provision was generated when the data got spread out to different Amazon data warehouses.
Conceptually, Amazon Glacier serves as the lower tier for the Amazon S3 storage. AWS provides a management console as a web tool that can easily help create vaults and assign sharing limitations for access. Vaults, more familiarly recognized as folders or directories, consist of archives, another name for the uploaded files. Each archive is assigned a unique archive ID that can later be used to retrieve the data. An archive can represent a single file or a zipped combination of several files to be uploaded as a single archive. A single file can be uploaded as an archive, but the overall costs will be lower if files are aggregated in TAR or ZIP formats before uploading to Amazon Glacier. Individual Amazon Glacier archives can range in size from 1 byte to 40 terabytes. The largest archive that can be uploaded in a single Upload request is 4 gigabytes. For items larger than 100 megabytes, customers should consider using the multipart upload capability. Archives stored in Amazon Glacier are immutable, i.e. archives can be uploaded and deleted but cannot be edited or overwritten.An individual account can have up to 1000 vaults and there is no maximum limit to the total amount of data that can be stored in Amazon Glacier.
Pricing & Other details
Some information that may make your start with AWS a little easier.
Below is the link for the Simple Monthly Calculator we had discussed:
http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html
If you have any questions, you can reply to this case using the following link:
https://console.aws.amazon.com/support/home?region=us-west-2#/
Some basic security practices including:
IAM set up for separate login:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul6FW4UANGc
Keeping your ports secured:
http://aws.amazon.com/articles/1233/
For more on all security for your account, see our AWS Security Center
http://aws.amazon.com/security/
Following are just a few links for keeping your account from accruing charges. The first is information for the free tier coverage, and the second for how to avoid unexpected charges:
http://aws.amazon.com/free/faqs/
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/checklistforunwantedcharges.html
Cloudwatch set up (Free tier monitoring alert set up):
To view your current charges at the Billing Console
https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?#/
Premium Support is offered 24/7 for help any technical questions you may have, and constant minoring of the account offered with the support, called Trusted Advisor: