Elasticluster aims to provide a user-friendly command line tool to create, manage and setup computing clusters hosted on cloud infrastructures (like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud EC2 or Google Compute Engine) or a private OpenStack cloud). Its main goal is to get your own private cluster up and running with just a few commands; a YouTube video demoes the basic features of elasticluster.
This project is an effort of the Grid Computing Competence Center at the University of Zurich, licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3.
Documentation for elasticluster is available on the Read The Docs website
Elasticluster is in active development, but offers the following features at the current state:
- Simple configuration file to define cluster templates
- Can start and manage multiple independent clusters at the same time
- Automated cluster setup:
- use Debian GNU/Linux, Ubuntu, or CentOS as a base operating system
- choose SLURM, Grid Engine or TORQUE+MAUI as a batch-queueing system
- setup your Hadoop cluster to start your favorite map/reduce job
- or create your IPython cluster to run your python code in parallel over multiple virtual machines
- configure a distributed storage like GlusterFS or Ceph, or a parallel filesystem like OrangeFS (formerly known as PVFS2)
- add useful tools like Ganglia for monitoring...
- ...or anything that you can install with an Ansible playbook!
- Grow and shrink a running cluster
Elasticluster is currently in active development: please use the GitHub issue tracker to file enhancement requests and ideas
We appreciate pull requests for new features and enhancements. Please use the master branch as starting point.
Elasticluster is a Python program; Python version 2.6 is required to run it.
It's quite easy to install elasticluster using pip; the command below is all you need to install elasticluster on your system:
pip install elasticluster
If you want to run elasticluster from source you have to install Ansible first:
pip install ansible python setup.py install
The source code of elasticluster is github, if you want to test the latest development version you can clone the github elasticluster repository.
You need the git command in order to be able to clone it, and we
suggest you to use python virtualenv in order to create a
controlled environment in which you can install elasticluster as
normal user.
Assuming you already have virtualenv installed on your machine,
you first need to create a virtualenv and install ansible, which is
needed by elasticluster:
virtualenv elasticluster . elasticluster/bin/activate pip install ansible
Then you have to download the software. We suggest you to download it within the created virtualenv:
cd elasticluster git clone git://github.com/gc3-uzh-ch/elasticluster.git src cd src python setup.py install
Now the elasticluster should be available in your current
environment.