Version History

0.92.1

release-date:11-05-2011

Features

• Support for splitting the config into an arbitrary set of files:

  [global]
  include=~/.starcluster/awscreds, ~/.starcluster/myconf

  See Splitting the Config into Multiple Files for more details

• createvolume: support naming/tagging newly created volumes:

  $ starcluster createvolume --name mynewvol 30 us-east-1d

  See Create and Format a new EBS Volume for more details

• listvolumes: add support for filtering by tags:

  $ starcluster listvolumes --name mynewvol
  $ starcluster listvolumes --tag mykey=myvalue

  See Managing EBS Volumes with StarCluster for more details

• sshmaster, sshnode, sshinstance: support for running remote commands from command line:

  $ starcluster sshmaster mycluster 'cat /etc/fstab'
  $ starcluster sshnode mycluster node001 'cat /etc/fstab'
  $ starcluster sshinstance i-99999999 'cat /etc/hosts'

  See Running Remote Commands on a Cluster from Command Line for more details

Bug Fixes

The following bugs were fixed in this release:

spothistory command

• add package_data to sdist in order to include the necessary web media and templates needed for the --plot feature. The previous 0.92 version left these out and thus the --plot feature was broken. This should be fixed.
• fix bug when launching default browser on mac

start command

• fix bug in option completion when using the start command’s --cluster-template option

terminate command

• fix bug in terminate cmd when region != us-east-1

listkeypairs command

• fix bug in list_keypairs when no keys exist

Improvements

• listinstances: add ‘state_reason’ msg to output if available
• add system info, Python info, and package versions to crash-report
• listregions: sort regions by name
• improved bash/zsh completion support. completion will read from the correct config file, if possible, in the case that the global -c option is specified while completing.
• separate the timing of cluster setup into time spent on waiting for EC2 instances to come up and time spent configuring the cluster after all instances are up and running. this is useful when profiling StarCluster’s performance on large (100+ node) clusters.

0.92

release-date:10-17-2011

News

Note

Before upgrading please be aware that rc1 does not support clusters created with previous versions and will print a warning along with instructions on how to proceed if it finds old clusters. With that said, it’s best not to upgrade until you’ve terminated any currently running clusters created with an old version. Also, the @sc-masters group is no longer needed and can be removed after upgrading by running “starcluster terminate masters”

You can find the new docs for 0.92rc1 here:

http://web.mit.edu/stardev/cluster/docs/0.92rc1/

NOTE: these docs are still very much a work in progress. If anyone is interested in helping to improve the docs, please fork the project on github and submit pull requests. Here’s a guide to get you started:

http://web.mit.edu/stardev/cluster/docs/0.92rc1/contribute.html

Please upgrade at your leisure, test the new release candidate, and submit any bug reports preferably on StarCluster’s github issue tracker or this mailing list.

Features

• Cluster Compute/GPU Instances- Added support for the new Cluster Compute/GPU instance types. Thanks to Fred Rotbart for his contributions

• EBS-Backed Clusters- Added support for starting/stopping EBS-backed clusters on EC2. The stop command now stops (instead of terminate) an EBS-backed cluster and terminates an S3-backed cluster. Added a terminate command that terminates any cluster

• Improved performance - using workerpool library (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/StarCluster) to configure nodes concurrently

• New ebsimage and s3image commands for easily creating new EBS-backed AMIs. Each command supports creating a new AMI from S3 and EBS-backed image hosts respectively. (NOTE: createimage has been renamed to s3image. you can still call createimage but this will go away in future releases)

• Add/Remove Nodes - added new addnode and removenode commands for adding/removing nodes to a cluster and removing existing nodes from a cluster

• Restart command - Added new restart command that reboots the cluster and reconfigures the cluster

• Create Keypairs - Added ability to add/list/remove keypairs

• Elastic Load Balancing - Support for shrinking/expanding clusters based on Sun Grid Engine queue statistics. This allow the user to start a single-node cluster (or larger) and scale the number of instances needed to meet the current SGE queue load. For example, a single-node cluster can be launched and as the queue load increases new EC2 instances are launched, added to the cluster, used for computation, and then removed when they’re idle. This minimizes the cost of using EC2 for an unknown and on-demand workload. Thanks to Rajat Banerjee (rqbanerjee)

• Security Group Permissions - Added ability to specify permission settings to be applied automatically to a cluster’s security group after it’s been started

• Multiple Instance Types - Added support for specifying instance types on a per-node basis. Thanks to Dan Yamins for his contributions

• Unpartitioned Volumes- StarCluster now supports both partitioned and unpartitioned EBS volumes

• New Plugin Hooks - Plugins can now play a part when adding or removing a node as well as when restarting or shutting down the entire cluster by implementing the on_remove_node, on_add_node, on_shutdown, and on_reboot methods respectively

• Added a runplugin command and fixed the run_plugin() method in the development shell. You can now run a plugin in the dev shell like so:

  ~[1]> cm.run_plugin('myplugin', 'mycluster')
  

• Added support for easily switching regions (without config changes) using a global -z option. For example:

  $ starcluster -r eu-west-1 listclusters
  StarCluster - (http://web.mit.edu/starcluster) (v. 0.92rc1)
  Software Tools for Academics and Researchers (STAR)
  Please submit bug reports to starcluster@mit.edu
  
  >>> No clusters found...

• Added new resizevolume command for easily resizing existing EBS volumes

• Added listregions/listzones commands