Hi Michelle,

I have not yet had the opportunity to make use of spot instances to run data through HCP processing pipelines. So please understand that I may not be able to adequately answer your questions. However, I'll try to make some helpful suggestions.

With regard to there being no NITRC option for the AMI selection menu, I'm assuming that you are starting from your AWS EC2 console (https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2). From that page, you should see the "Spot Requests" link under the "INSTANCES" heading along the left hand side. You then select the "Spot Requests" link to get taken to the "Request Spot Instances" page. Again, I'm assuming that you then select the "Request Spot Instances" button at the bottom of the table of your current Spot requests.

Near the top of the "Requirements" section on the "Request Spot Instances" page, there is an AMI specification row with a pull down selector that gives you choices of AMI's to use for your spot instance request. I'm guessing that when you say that "There's no NITRC option for the AMI selection menu, and when I try to search for it, there are no results" you mean that the pull down menu doesn't include a NITRC option, and you selected the "Search for AMI" button to the right of the AMI pull down menu and fill in the search field with "NITRC" or something similar. This indeed seems to give no results.

The default group of AMIs in which to search (see the pull down just to the right of the search text field) is "My AMIs". If you select/pull-down that menu and choose the AMI group "Community AMIs", then I think that your search for a NITRC AMI will return some AMIs from which to select. (At least it does when I try it.)

However...I don't think it would be appropriate for you to request a Spot Instance using one of the NITRC HCP AMIs. (Again, recall that I haven't had the opportunity to use spot instances, so I'm hypothesizing here.) You'll recall that the NITRC HCP AMI is not fully "ready to go" for logging in and running pipelines. There is some additional configuration that you need to do (install the FreeSurfer license, mount the S3 data, create a user account, etc.) before any instance created from a NITRC HCP AMI is really ready to use. My guess is that you would need to have an AMI that is fully "ready to use" prepared to use for a spot instance.  My thought is that the way to do this would be to start with the NITRC AMI, get an instance configured so that it is all ready to use, then use that instance as the starting point for creating your own AMI. Then the AMI that you created would be the one you would choose for your spot instances. (The AMI that you created would show up in the "My AMIs" group, which seems to be why that group is the default for searching for AMIs when creating a spot request.)

As for your connection issue, I suspect you are correct that there is something wrong with your security settings. Which type of instance are you trying to access via DNS and/or SSH? A non-NITRC spot instance or a NITRC-AMI-based on-demand instance that you've created?

  Tim

On 12/06/2017 05:10 PM, Michelle Chiu wrote:
Hi,

Does anyone know how to create a spot instance on AWS with the NITRC Computational AMI?

Configuring and using on-demand instances has been really straightforward thanks to the wiki page1, but when I try to make a spot instance, I have two main issues: 1) There's no NITRC option for the AMI selection menu, and when I try to search for it, there are no results 2a) when I try to access the instance via public DNS, my requests keep timing out 2b) when I try to access the instance via SSH, I get the error message that 'the resource is temporarily unavailable' I suspect that my connection issues are because I didn't choose the security options correctly, so I'll try different configurations. If I can connect to the non-NITRC spot instance, I'll be able to transfer the s3 humanconnectome data from an on-demand instance and download FSL, but I wanted to see whether I've missed something.
Thanks!

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--
/Timothy B. Brown
Business & Technology Application Analyst III
Pipeline Developer (Connectome Coordination Facility)
tbbrown(at)wustl.edu
/
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