Setting up an HPC cluster on AWS

This is an eight-part series on setting up an HPC cluster on AWS. The main design elements of the cluster will be as follows

The cluster will have seven virtual machines (VMs)

• One head / control node

• One login node

• Three compute nodes

• Two storage nodes

• All the VMs will have the OS Rocky Linux 9.6 (Blue Onyx)

  • AMI: ami-0f2425d4cce4e97dd

  • Instance Type: t3.2xlarge

• BeeGFS is used as the shared filesystem

• OpenPBS is used as the HPC job scheduler

• OpenLDAP is used for user management

• Prometheus and Grafana is used for cluster monitoring

  
  

We use the following nomenclature throughout

• Each machine in the cluster will be called node

• The laptop or the desktop we use will be called local system

The cluster setup is divided into eight parts

• Part 1: VM setup for an HPC cluster in AWS

• Part 2: Initial package installation in AWS instances

• Part 3: Enabling password less SSH in an AWS cluster

• Part 4: Setting up a BeeGFS file system in an AWS cluster

• Part 5: Setting up a PBS scheduler in an AWS cluster

• Part 6: Setting up an LDAP system in an AWS cluster

• Part 7: Setting up Prometheus and Grafana in an AWS cluster

• Part 8: Using AWS CLI, Terraform CLI and Ansible to automate AWS cluster creation

The AMI and instance type used here may not be available on the AWS free tier. The main GitHub repo for is available here.