Run SOLVCON on Google Compute Engine

[Yung-Yu Chen]

Hello,

It’s been a while since the last time I updated the status of SOLVCON in this mailing list (sol...@googlegroups.com).  I really should add more traffic here :)

Here’s some news.  I am bringing SOLVCON to [Google Compute Engine (GCE)](https://cloud.google.com/compute/).  GCE is a convenient cloud service, and I plan to use to help develop the code.  To do it I write some helper scripts to create, provision, and manage the GCE virtual-machine (VM) instances, and put them in a git repository https://github.com/solvcon/solvcon-gce (“solvcon-gce”).

Those shell scripts are wrappers of [Google Cloud Platform SDK](https://cloud.google.com/sdk/) command-line tools.  It’s possible to directly use the SDK to do the work, but it takes many commands and bandwidth and is tedious.  The solvcon-gce scripts automate the operations and can get me a usable instance in 2 minutes.  And an n1-standard-1 instance (single VCPU with 3.5 GB ram) delivers good performance, and is better than my MacBookAir.  It’s quite nice.

For code development, the distance to the data center matters.  Too long distance results into too much latency.  Currently I hard-code to use the asia-east1-c GCP zone, which is the closest one to me.  It gives me less than 50 ms ping time.

Other work for SOLVCON is in progress.  I am porting the computing core from C to C++.  I will also review and update the MPI code, and at that time solvcon-gce will be augmented to create MPI clusters on GCE.

The [readme](https://github.com/solvcon/solvcon-gce/blob/master/README.md) describes how to use the scripts.  If you want to use the scripts and the asia-east1 region is too far away from you, please [create an issue at Github](https://github.com/solvcon/solvcon-gce/issues/new).  There are still many other rough ends.  Your comments are very welcomed.

Yung-Yu

--
Yung-Yu Chen
http://yyc.solvcon.net/
+886 (99) 129 4763

[Taihsiang Ho]

Hi,
thanks for the fabulous infrastructure. I really appreciate it.
I have followed the README instruction to play around with it a bit.
Here is my feedback:

• PR for README enhancement.
• an issue for conda installation on a instance.

Cheers,

Taihsiang

Yung-Yu Chen於 2016年7月10日星期日 UTC+8下午3時10分41秒寫道：