[Numpy-discussion] Numpy/Scipy for EC2

[David Goldsmith]

On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 9:03 AM, Dan Yamins <dyamins at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 1:32 AM, David Goldsmith <d.l.goldsmith at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Dan-
>>
>>     I almost hate to ask - after what you've already provided, which is
>> substantial: did you ever try out what alestic had to offer?  If not, I may
>> be that guinea pig. ;-)
>>
>>
> David -- I'm posting my response to your question to the group as well ...
>
>
> I never tried out the alestic AMIs *directly* ... that's because at least
> as far as I could tell (I might be wrong about this), they didn't have blas,
> lapack, scipy, etc prebuilt on them.
>
> But the whole StarCluster thing *is* basically Alestic fundamentally,
> since the AMIs that StarCluster provides were themselves built directly from
> Alestic's 32-bit and 64-bit Ubuntu jaunty AMIs ... with comparatively small
> but crucial modifications (building optimized blas, scipy, the Sun Grid
> Engine, NFS &c).  From a "systems" point of view should basically have the
> same stability properties.
>
> The real strength of starcluster is that, in addition to those small but
> crucial additions to the Alestic AMIs, Starcluster also provides a simple
> command for making startup/admin/termination of a multi-node cluster really
> easy.  With one invocation, it will interface with EC2 commands to start up
> the relevant machine instances, mount a shared NFS drive from an amazon EBS
> volume, start up the grid engine, etc... so that all the headaches of
> setting up and breaking down the pieces of a multi-node shared-memory
> cluster are completely handled for you.
>
> Is there a particular reason you had in mind for using Alestic directly?
> I'd be interested to hear your use case ...
>

Thanks, Dan.  Nope, no particular reason than "coverage within the
community": now that you've explained the relationship between the two (if,
between the initial description of the Alestic option and your thorough
description of Starcluster, it was supposed to be clear that the latter was
just an enhanced former, it flew by me while I was paying attention to
technical details) I'm perfectly happy to follow the trail you've already
blazed.

Thanks again,

DG


>
> Dan
>
> Btw -- I got an email from Justin Riley, the developer of starcluster -- he
> seems to be hard at work  on the next release (which will have hadoop,
> couchdb, and some important improvements to the management of multiple
> clusters.  still no word on dynamic load balancing tho)
>
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