Dynamo in Amazon EC2

We are preparing a release of Dynamo for the EC2 cloud computing service. This will allow users without access to a graphic accelerator to use Dynamo on a powerful GPU in the cloud, paying only for the actually used computing time, and avoid the purchase, installation and maintenance of special hardware.

The Dynamo AMI itself can be used free of charge and needs no additional license. It delivers a tested installation of all needed software (Dynamo, CUDA, MCR libraries), ready for immediate use upon connection to your account.

Feel free to contact us if you want to be a beta tester.

Creating an account

We will post here a walkthrough for the creation of an user account in the Amazon EC2.

selecting the EC2 services

The EC2 dashboard

Configuring an instance

Launch an instance

Your instance will be built on the top of a CUDA7.5 for Ubuntu instance. You can find it in the Amazon Marketplace.

Launching an instance

Information after launching of the instance

The bottom of the popup window tells you how to connect to the instance on later point. However, the information is not totally correct, as the user name you need to use is ec2-user. This information can be consulted [in the documentation provided by Amazon]

Connecting to the instance

Once your instance is running, you can connect to it through an ssh terminal. Typically, you need to include the key file generated in the moment of launching the instance. Remember that you 'need to ensurer that your key is not publicly viewable through chmod

chmod 400 myKey.pem

Then you can connect to your instance of the NVIDIA AMI

ssh -i "myKey.pem"  ec2-user@<instance public DNS> 

Here, the instance location should look something like ec2-52-214-203-126.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com

Running Dynamo projects

We will post here a walkthrough for the use of your account.

Copying Dynamo

In your local machine:

scp -i "keyFile.pem" <your Dynamo tar> <your amazon instance>:/home/ubuntu/

Setting the terminal

Then, you can ssh to your EC2 terminal. There, you still need to operate a couple of adjustments:

mkdir dynamo

tar -xf <Dynamo tar file> -C /home/ubuntu/dynamo 

You need to make an extra couple of adjustments on your terminal. The AMI provided by envidia needs to be able to talk to the Matlab libraries provided by your Dynamo tar.

sudo yum install -y libXt 

Now you are ready to go. This terminal will be able to run Dynamo projects in the usual way.