Tara Madhyastha

postgresql

Creating a PostgreSQL Database in RONIN

We previously blogged about installing MySQL on a RONIN machine. But databases are different, and another open source database that is popular among researchers is PostgreSQL. This blog post teaches you how to install and connect to a PostgreSQL database with RONIN.

spack

Spack is Research Computing's Best Friend

Research and cloud computing are a perfect fit, but the reality of managing software on dynamic clusters in the cloud can be a challenge. Fortunately, nifty tools like Spack can help get you up and running with optimised versions of your required software in just minutes.

slurm

Parallelizing Workloads With Slurm (Brute Force Edition)

One of the reasons researchers turn to clusters and Slurm is to run many independent jobs. Recently, we posted about how to use Slurm job arrays to do this. Here we describe some additional intuitive ways of getting the job(s) done.

admin

Viewing RONIN Log Activity With Splunk: Part 1

A universal requirement for compliance is that logs be kept to track certain activities and data access. In this blog post we describe how to use Splunk to examine audit trail logs from RONIN Core.

s3

How To Make Your Object Storage Look Like a File System with FUSE

In RONIN, we treat Object Storage (which are Amazon S3 Buckets) as a separate thing from file systems not just to throw more jargon into a complicated space, but for Really Good Reasons. If you are not nodding vigorously along with this first sentence please read The Fine Print at

instance

Selecting the Right Machine Type for the Right Job

RONIN and cloud computing represent a different way of thinking. Choosing a machine type means understanding how different selections for CPU, memory, storage, and other characteristics will affect the time to do your work. This blog post will provide some guidelines for choosing wisely.

hpc

Modeling Air Quality With RONIN and Odycloud

In this post, we have invited Arturo Fernandez, founder of Odycloud, to describe how he scales research IT support for a variety of air quality and weather modeling problems.

admin-collection

Automating RONIN Cost Reports with AWS Cost Explorer

What happens when RONIN users and administrators want to keep a closer watchful eye on where the money is going?

admin-collection

Automating Little Things With Lambda

When you need to automate a little thing in RONIN, look towards AWS Lambda.

database

Creating a MySQL Database in RONIN

Databases are not necessarily part of a researcher's daily toolkit, although they are an important part of websites, data management systems, and popular repositories of data that researchers access.

project

Project Pause and Auto Pause

RONIN does a lot of things to help you prevent overspend, such as Smart Schedule and Budget Management, but we at RONIN have been working hard to help you have complete peace of mind that you won’t experience financial disaster. Introducing Project Auto Pause!

hpc

A Beginner's Glossary for HPC in the Cloud

High Performance Computing (HPC) has its own terminology, which is complexified (a real word!) by cloud terminology. Our goal is to simply define these terms to make it easier for users who are not cloud or IT gurus to create and launch clusters using RONIN on AWS....

admin

What We Talk About When We Talk About Supporting Researchers on the Cloud

It's obvious, isn't it? The purpose of research computing support is to enable researchers to conduct more research faster, to make new discoveries, to publish more influential papers, obtain more grant funding, and train the next generation. But in practice...

storage

Everything You Never Needed to Know About Drives, File Systems and Storage

When you build a computer, it needs storage. When you build a computer on the cloud, you try to get by with the smallest disk drives (or volumes) you can to fit the software and data that you have, so that you can avoid paying for disk space you don't need.

linux

A Gentle Guide to Linux File Permissions

Linux file permissions are mysterious, and when faced with permissions errors, most researchers respond either by using sudo or by changing the permissions so that everyone can do everything to the files. The first is the equivalent of finding a locked door and bashing it in....

Administrator

Your RONIN Superpower: The sudo Command

Everyone who creates a machine or a cluster in RONIN has a superpower: the ability to become somebody else. Another user on that computer, that is, including the supreme superuser who has permissions to do anything, whose name is "root".

s3

Connect R to Object Storage

There's so much research data out there and R is a popular way to mash it up, scrape it down, run statistics on it and make it beautiful. You can access research data available in object storage buckets directly from within R....

cluster

New Machine or New Autoscaling Cluster? Which Should I Choose?

When you begin to work with RONIN you are immediately faced with a choice — do you create a new machine? Or an autoscaling cluster? And what is the difference and why do you have to choose at all? MachinesA machine is a single computer, even though it can have multiple