icecloud

Launch a compute cluster running icecream for distributed compilation. Provides a simple CLI for launching and managing the compilation cluster, built on tinycloud and clicloud.

Note: This module launches clusters, which can cost real money. It is also still under development. Carefully monitor your usage!

mascot

install

Install as a CLI with

npm install icecloud -g

usage

To launch the cluster run

icecloud launch beast -k mykey -n 5

where beast is a name for your cluster, -k specifies the name of your key pair, and -n specifies the number of worker nodes. After a few minutes, run the setup using

icecloud setup beast -i mykey.pem

where -i specifies the location of your key pair file. If you get an error during setup saying timed out or ECONNREFUSED, just wait a few minutes and try again. This happens because instances take a variable amount of time to become ssh-ready.

Finally, login to the master node to run jobs

icecloud login beast master -i mykey.pem

Once on the master, setup whatever build environment you want that supports distributed compilation. When you start the build, it will use your cluster to complete tasks. See the example use case below for how to use this cluster to build Chrome.

example use case

One likely use case is performing distributed builds of Chrome. This is what the biggies do, and now you can do it too!

First launch your cluster, the m3.large instance type is recommended, as well as a large root volume (50gb should be enough)

icecloud launch chromeo -k mykey -n 5 -t m3.large -s 50

Run the icecc setup (as described above)

icecloud setup chromeo -i mykey.pem 

Now you need to set up the Chromium dev environment. This part has nothing to do with icecream or icecloud, but we made a sample script as an example if you want to try it out. Login to the master node

icecloud login chromeo master -i mykey.pem

then run the environment setup script (this will take ~30 min)

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/freeman-lab/icecloud/master/examples/chrome.sh >> chrome.sh
bash chrome.sh

Finally, start your distributed build

cd src
source ~/.bashrc
ninja -j 10 -C out/Release chrome

monitoring

The scheduler includes a monitoring tool. To connect to it, get the public IP of the scheduler using

icecloud list chromeo scheduler -i mykey.pem

Then ssh into the scheduler with X11 forwarding

ssh -i mykey.pem -X ubuntu@IP

And finally start the monitor

icemon -n $ICECC_NAME