Question about using FDS on AWS

[Dave Sheppard]

I want to research whether using Amazon Web Services (AWS) would be a viable solution for FDS instead of maintaining our own in-house cluster.  

I have to work through my organization’s IT department to get access to the Amazon service.  They will need for me to provide a description for what Amazon services that I want to use.

Can anyone assist in defining what I need to ask for?

Thanks,

Dave

[Craig Weinschenk]

Please see this thread: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!searchin/fds-smv/AWS%7Csort:relevance/fds-smv/4mkIvl6_8As/g343iGc1EwAJ

[dr_jfloyd]

You may want to look at the AWS GovCloud. GovCloud uses only US based servers and US Citizens for operations.

https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/

On Tuesday, January 17, 2017 at 12:36:37 PM UTC-5, Dave Sheppard wrote:

[Dave Sheppard]

Thanks, Craig and Jason for the responses.

The discussion that Craig referred to, said that the person was using Amazon EC2.  Is the service that I need to request "Amazon EC2"?  Are there more details that I will need to provide to the IT department?

[dr_jfloyd]

EC2 is Amazon's compute service. It is where you can launch an FDS simulation. It is not intended for storage of data once a job finishes.  For that you will need to use other Amazon services like EBS or S3.

[Andrew]

We do use AWS EC2 for running jobs but more of an overflow when our in house cluster is full.  I certainly wouldn't want to use it instead of an in house cluster.

AWS EC2 is configured for do a whole variety of functions rather than just HPC applications.  Therefore performance is not as good as other computing providors.  Also you need to use full boxes rather than partial boxes to avoid the issue of noisy neighbours affecting your runtimes which looses a lot of flexibility in how you run jobs.

What AWS EC2 is providing an IAAS solution.  Therefore there is quite a bit of work required to configure firewall permissions, head nodes, storage, networking, visualisation and compute node tuning to get it running optimally.

[Sabalcore Computing]

It would be worth your time to try out Sabalcore Computing. We have been supporting FDS users for years and make it easy to get started running your models quickly. Our infrastructure is designed and built especially for HPC workloads and have compiled FDS specifically for our hardware. New accounts come with 500 free core-hours so you can try before you buy.

On Tuesday, January 17, 2017 at 12:36:37 PM UTC-5, Dave Sheppard wrote: