Folding on AWS

This is a CDK project which configures a multi-instance ASG. As an example, there are two sets of configs predefined: the first config creates a two-node ASG pointed to an AMI which is pre-configured to run Folding@Home, while the second config is for a single-node ASG running a base install of Ubuntu with some extras (check packer/generic_base cvonfig for details)

The AMIs are configured and built using HashiCorp's Packer. These AMIs can then be updated in the config file.

How to run

Preparing the AMI

• Install packer

• Generate AWS access keys

• Set the following variables in your shell's environment: AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, AWS_DEFAULT_REGION

• Change into the packer sub directory: cd packer

• Build the Folding at Home Amazon Machine Image that will be used to create the virtual machines

  packer build -var 'fah_user=your_username' -var 'fah_passkey=your_passkey' \
              -var 'fah_team=your_team_id' fah_ami.json
  

• If you have the jq program installed, the packer build will attempt to set the AMI ID in config.yaml automatically. If not, please edit the config.yaml and set the AMI ID as well as other parameters.

Configuring the stack

• Install CDK

• Setup a venv with

    python3 -m venv .env
  

• Activate the venv

    source .env/bin/activate
  

• Install the dependencies

    pip install -r requirements.txt
  

• Copy the config.sample.yaml file to config.yaml and set the appropriate values. Additional documentation is available in the sample configuration file. The config.yaml supports multiple configuration sets, each denoted by the root key. To deploy a specific config, we use the context feature of CDK.

For example, if you want to create different config sets with different regions and VPCs, the config will look like below

everything:
  region: eu-west-1
  cidr: 10.1.0.0/22

folding:
  region: us-east-1
  cidr: 10.0.0.0/16

The root keys, everything and folding will have to be passed as context when working with CDK, The VPC and ASG stacks created will have the root key as a prefix.

• Show the cloudformation template

    cdk synth <stack name> -c stack_name=<config-name>
    cdk synth folding-vpc -c stack_name=folding
  

• Or just deploy

    cdk deploy <stack names> -c stack_name=<config-name>
    cdk deploy folding-vpc folding-asg -c stack_name=folding