Introduction

This tutorial provides a self-guided training starting point for first-time users of the FutureGrid infrastructure. The tutorial guides users through the process of obtaining user accounts, credentials to access Cloud middleware (Nimbus and/or Eucalyptus), and instantiating a virtual appliance on FutureGrid hardware.

The examples in this self-guided tutorial are based on the Grid appliance image, which is the baseline appliance image used in teaching/training activities in FutureGrid. You will be guided through the process of deploying virtual clusters on FutureGrid running the Grid appliance with Condor, MPI, or Hadoop stacks, and the GroupVPN virtual network stack. Once you are familiar with the process of deploying the Grid appliance, you will be able to follow the same overall sequence of steps to deploy your own customized virtual machine images.

The intended audience of this tutorial consists of users involved in projects that use FutureGrid in research, instructors who use FutureGrid in educational/training activities, and users who are planning to use FutureGrid in research and education and seek to evaluate its capabilities.

Flow Chart - Overview

1. Setting up FutureGrid Account

1.1. FutureGrid Early Project Registration

Navigate to FutureGrid's portal page and fill up the form. In this multi-step online form you will be asked for information regarding your research or education project. You will also be asked to provide an SSH public key that will be used later on to access FutureGrid resources.

1.2. Access to FutureGrid hardware

If you are going to use virtual machines through Eucalyptus or Nimbus, ensure that you select one or more of the iDataPlex resources in the request.

Once you finish your registration, you will receive an email from FutureGrid asking to provide confirmation that you have read the user responsibility form (URF). Follow the instructions in this email.

At the point when you receive confirmation that your account has been created, you will be able to ssh into the FutureGrid resources, but not yet to create virtual machine instances.

2. Cloud Computing on FutureGrid

There are currently two open-source cloud computing stacks on FutureGrid: Eucalyptus or Nimbus toolkit. The following subsections describe how to get started on both frameworks. You may follow one approach if you are interested in depth in a given framework, or follow both approaches if your goal is to gain breadth in understanding of the different approaches.

2.a. Nimbus Cloud Environment

For a tutorial on how to use Nimbus to deploy your first instance on FutureGrid, follow the Using Nimbus on FutureGrid tutorial NM1. To get quickly up and running on using Nimbus client-side tools, you may want to follow the Using the Grid appliance to run FutureGrid Cloud clients tutorial GA6.

2.b. Eucalyptus Cloud Environment

For a tutorial on how to use Eucalyptus to deploy your first instance on FutureGrid, follow the Using Eucalyptus on FutureGrid tutorial EU1. To get quickly up and running on using Eucalyptus client-side tools, you may want to follow the Using the Grid appliance to run FutureGrid Cloud clients tutorial GA6.

3. Setting up GroupVPN for creating virtual clusters

After completing the above two steps, you can create one or more virtual machine instances on the cloud. Ths next step will now guide you through the process of creating a virtual private network (VPN) interconnecting your virt ual machine instances, so they form a virtual cluster. This step is optional and is primarily intended for those who are interested in creating easy-to-configure virtual clusters for classes and tutorials, and those who are interested in learning more about virtual networking - in particular, GroupVPN, a group-secured VPN network using the IPOP IP-over-P2P virtual network to create virtual clusters for running parallel and batch applications. GroupVPN can be used to easily consolidate physical machines, virtual machine instances and cloud instances into a single virtual cluster.

Click here to create an account at www.grid-appliance.org.

3.1. Set up a GroupVPN

Log into www.grid-appliance.org Follow the instructions at GroupVPN Web User Interface and configure a GroupVPN with the desired configuration.

3.2. Set up a GroupAppliance

The Grid Appliance site allows you to create floppy disks with the configuration files required by GroupVPN. To do this, follow the instruction mentioned here.

4. Choose / Create a grid-appliance image

Depending on your application, choose a grid-appliance image. We have created grid-appliance images tailored for the FutureGrid clouds. To create custom images, you can use the debian packages for MPI and Hadoop. Detailed tutorials are provided below: