NWP Containers Online Tutorial | Introduction > Running on the cloud

See AWS documentation for more information

• Navigate to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Management Console by clicking on the "Services" tab at the top. Under the "Compute" section, select "EC2". 

• Determine what region you are running under by looking in the top right corner of the screen. To use the DTC AMI, you need to use the "N. Virginia" region. If this is not what you see, use the drop-down arrow and select the "US East (N. Virginia)" region.

For this tutorial, you can use an environment that has already been established for you: an Amazon Machine Image (AMI).

• Click the "AMIs" link on the left side "EC2 Dashboard"
   

You will initially not see any AMIs listed, since you do not own any images.

• Select "Public Images" from the dropdown as shown.

• In the search bar, enter in the name of the DTC AMI:  "dtc-utility-base-env_v4.1.0" and press enter.
• Select the resulting AMI from the list window.  
• Once selected, click the blue "Launch" button at the top of the page

After launching the AMI, the next step is to configure the instance prior to using it.

• From the "Filter by" dropdown list, select the "c5" option (a "compute-optimized" instance; see this page for more info on AWS instance types) to see a smaller list of possible selections.

• Scroll down and click the box next to the "c5.4xlarge" instance type and click the "Next: Configure Instance Details" button on the bottom right of the page. 

• There is no need to further configure the instance details on the next page so simply click the button the bottom right of the page for "Next: Add Storage"

• If the storage size has not already been increased, change the storage from the default of 8 to 60 Gb and click the "Next: Add Tags" button on the bottom right of the page.

• Add a personal tag to identify what instance is yours.
  1. Select the blue link in the middle of the page that says "click to add a Name tag". This is a key-value pair where key=Name and value=your_personal_nametag
  2. On the next page the key will automatically be set to "Name" (leave this as is) and you simply assign a name of your choice to the Value in the second box. The value can be set to anything you will recognize and is unlikely to be used by anyone else. Note, it is not recommended to use any spaces in your name.
     • NOTE: The key should literally be called "Name"; do not change the text in the left box
  3. Click the "Next: Configure Security Group" button on the bottom right of the page.

• Amazon requires us to set a unique security group name for each AWS instance. We will also need to set some rules in order to properly set up access to visualize verification output with the METviewer GUI. These steps will both be done on the "Configure Security Group" page.
  1. The field "Security group name" will be filled in with an automated value. If other tutorial users are attempting to launch an instance with this same automated value, it will fail, so you should replace the given value with any unique group name you desire.
  2. Select the button on the left hand side that says "Add Rule". Under the drop down menu, select "HTTP". The port range for HTTP is 80.
  3. Note: Rules with source of 0.0.0.0/0 allow all IP addresses to access your instance. You can modify setting security group rules to allow access from known IP addresses only by clicking the "Custom" drop down menu and selecting "My IP".

     
      

  4. Click the blue "Review and Launch" button at the bottom of the page to continue.

• You can review the selected configuration settings and select the blue "Launch" button in the bottom right corner.
   
• It will be necessary to create an ssh key pair to allow for SSH access into your instance.
  1. In the first drop down box, choose "create a new key pair".
  2. In the second box for the key pair name, choose any name you’d like but make sure it does not include any spaces. (e.g., your_name-aws-ssh)
  3. Click the "Download Key Pair" button and the key pair will be placed in your local Downloads directory, named: name_you_chose.pem (Note, Some systems will add .txt to the end of the *.pem file name so the file may actually be named name_you_chose.pem.txt)

Windows users: please review Windows information sheet

• To access your instance running in the cloud you first need to set up your ssh access from your remote system
  1. Open a terminal window and create a new directory to access your AWS cloud instance
     
     mkdir ~/AWS
  2. Go into the new directory and then move your *.pem file into it and change the permissions of the file
     
     cd ~/AWS
     mv ~/Downloads/name_you_chose.pem .
     chmod 600 name_you_chose.pem

           

• Finally, back in your browser window:
  1. click "Launch Instances" 
  2. click the blue "View Instances" button on the bottom right corner of the next page.
• Look for the instance with the name you gave it. As soon as you see a green dot and "Running" under the "Instance State" column, your instance is ready to use!

•  You will need to obtain your IPV4 Public IP from the AWS "Active Instances" web page. This can be found from your AWS instances page as shown below:
   

• From your newly created AWS directory, ssh into your instance. (Windows users: please review Windows information sheet)
  
  ssh -X -i name_you_chose.pem ec2-user@IPV4_public_IP

  OR on a mac, change the “X” to a “Y”:

  ssh -Y -i name_you_chose.pem ec2-user@IPV4_public_IP
• The IPV4 public IP is something that is unique to your particular instance. If you stop/re-start your instance, this public IP will be different each time.
• Feel free to open multiple terminals and log into your instance (using the same credentials) several times if you so desire.
• From this point on, you will mostly be working in your terminal window; however, you may occasionally need to look back at the AWS web page, so be sure to keep the AWS console open in your browser.
• Once you are in your instance from the terminal window you should see the following set-up:

        

• Select: Amazon Linux 2 AMI (HVM), SSD Volume Type (64 bit/x86)
• Select: C5.4xlarge
• Select: Change storage to 60 GB
• Configure Security Group: Add rule for HTTP (Set Source to MyIP)

(use your own pem file and public IP address from the instance you launched in step 1):

Install packages

Compile HDF5 from source

Compile netCDF from source

Compile UDUNITS from source

Compile ncview from source

Install ImageMagick and x11

Install docker

Start Docker automatically upon instance creation

Install docker-compose

• To ensure that Docker is correctly initialized, one time only you must:
  • exit
  • Log back in with same IP address
  • (DO NOT terminate the instance)

Install wgrib2

Install Singularity prerequisites

Install Go

Install Singularity

Finally, you should enter your home directory and modify the .bashrc and .bash_profile files to properly set the environment each time you log in.

Edits to .bashrc are shown in bold

Additionally, you should add the following line to ~/.bash_profile:

Then, source the .bash_profile file to enable these new changes to the environment