Re: [HTCondor-users] Elastically extend local condor pool by EC2 instances

[Jens Schmaler <jens.schmaler@xxxxxx>]

Hi Marty,

thanks so much for your answer!

> [advantage of separate cloud cluster]

Yes, of course, this is a good point. Still it seems that you are also
considering to directly add cloud instances to your cluster. Does that
mean you found that network reliability is not so much of a problem in
practice? (network traffic is, of course, another important issue)

> I don't know if you can connect Linux instances back to your Windows
> pool, but we're testing a tool developed by the HTCondor team called
> condor_annex [1], which allows you to manually order up EC2 instances
> that then connect back to your external pool. If you're interested in
> this, I can pass along the secret sauce you would need to bake into
> your instance images to get this working. I need to write something
> up on this soon anyway. We're in the middle of working on how to
> provision the condor_annex instances automatically based on user job
> demand, so this might all be more auto-magic in the near future.

That sounds really interesting! I'd be highly interested to learn more
about this. There is not much information online about this tool
somehow. Is it a linux-only solution?

> 
> If you are familiar with glideinWMS and want a fully-automated
> solution for ordering up EC2 instances now, you could setup a
> glideinWMS system to request glideins be submitted to a cfncluster
> [2]. cfncluster will automatically spin up instances based on the
> number of submitted glideins to its local batch queue. This would be
> quite a bit to setup, but it might work nicely if tuned up correctly.
> It would also be nice if cfncluster supported HTCondor
> out-of-the-box, but until then, glideins are the only way I can see
> to work around this.

Also a very good point. I have seen cfncluster, but have not understood
whether it can also build windows clusters (probably not?). My
impression is that our limitation to windows is really an obstacle in
this whole project.

Thanks and best regards,
Jens