Posted On: Nov 19, 2020

Amazon ParallelCluster is a fully supported and maintained open source cluster management tool that makes it easy for scientists, researchers, and IT administrators to deploy and manage High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters in the Amazon Web Services cloud. HPC clusters are collections of tightly coupled compute, storage, and networking resources that enable customers to run large scale scientific and engineering workloads. 

Significant feature enhancements to this latest release of ParallelCluster include:

  • Support for the CentOS 8 Operating System: Customers can now choose CentOS 8 as their base operating system of choice to run their clusters for both x86 and Arm architectures. As with other operating systems supported by Amazon ParallelCluster, you can choose your operating system using the base_os configuration option, and can also choose to create and use your own custom AMI built on top of CentOS 8. CentOS 8 support also includes compatibility with all of Amazon ParallelCluster’s supported schedulers and NICE DCV for remote visualization.
  • Amazon CloudWatch Cluster Metrics Dashboard: Customers can track and visualize operational metrics for their clusters in CloudWatch. This includes metrics such as CPU and network utilization, file system read and write data operations, and read and write operations for Amazon Elastic Block Store volumes. Customers can use this dashboard to visualize cluster usage or identify performance bottlenecks to diagnose how best to improve cluster performance.
  • Support for Amazon FSx for Lustre: Customers can now enable Amazon FSx for Lustre filesystems with Amazon ParallelCluster. FSx for Lustre is a fully managed Amazon Web Services service that makes it easy and cost effective to run the world’s popular high-performance file system. Customers can select from any of the persistent storage options by configuring the deployment_type option inside their configuration file’s fsx settings section.  

Amazon ParallelCluster is available at no additional charge, and you pay only for the Amazon Web Services resources needed to run your applications. Amazon ParallelCluster is released via the Python Package Index (PyPI). Amazon ParallelCluster’s source code is hosted under the Amazon Web Services repository on GitHub, where you can learn how to launch your own HPC cluster on Amazon Web Services.

For more detail you can find the complete release notes for the latest version of Amazon ParallelCluster here