Running R on Amazon EC2
talk
R
group meeting
cloud computing
What to do when the HPC allocation runs out: choosing, launching and reusing an Amazon EC2 machine for R simulations.
The session started from a familiar problem: one of the unit’s HPC accounts had gone over its CPU-hour limit. Amazon EC2 is one way to keep simulations running in the meantime. I went through the steps I followed:
- choosing a region and an instance type from the price list (for example 64 vCPUs in the London region), and using the EC2 instance type finder, which recommended compute-optimised Graviton instances (C7g, C7gd, C8g) for numerical simulations;
- the free tier and the starting credits for new accounts;
- launching an instance from a template, connecting over SSH and checking the load with
htop; - installing R on Debian and saving the configured machine as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), so the next machine starts with R 4.5.2 already set up.