StarCluster @ Independent Activities Period (IAP) 2010

Title: Using StarCluster: A Toolbox for Managing Amazon Elastic Compute Clouds.

Duration: 2 day workshop
Enrollment: limited to 20 participants
Participants requested to attend all sessions

Web: http://web.mit.edu/star/cluster/iap2010/
Contact: Justin Riley (jtriley@mit.edu)
Sponsor: Office of Education Innovation and Technology

Location: 14-0637

Schedule:

1. Tuesday, January 19, 2010: 1st day 4 hrs (intro, hands-on)
2. Week break (homework period)
3. Tuesday, January 26, 2010: 2nd day 2 hrs (review homework, discuss issues)

Description:

StarCluster is a utility for creating and managing general purpose computing clusters hosted on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

StarCluster makes it easy to create a traditional computing cluster used in research labs or for general purpose parallel and distributed computing applications in the cloud. All that's needed to get started with your own computing cluster on EC2 is an Amazon AWS account and the StarCluster software.

In this two day course we'll discuss how the Software Tools for Academics and Researchers (STAR) group at MIT has used StarCluster in the classroom to teach parallel programming and materials science. Students will learn how to install and run StarCluster, and how to customize StarCluster with their own software tools and data. There will be one week between sessions for a homework assignment where students will be asked to use StarCluster to create their own computing cluster on Amazon EC2 tailored to their needs.

Prereq:

All participants will need to sign up for an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account 1) prior to attending the sessions. Basic knowledge of Amazon EC22) and Python3) is recommended but not strictly required.