Running with docker on AWS - OLD probably outdated
This page, along with the other AWS run guides, are not deprecated in case we need to run flepiMoP on AWS again in the future, but also are not maintained as other platforms (such as longleaf and rockfish) are preferred for running production jobs.
For large simulations, running the model on a cluster or cloud computing is required. AWS provides a good solution for this, if funding or credits are available (AWS can get very expensive).
Introduction
This document contains instructions for setting up and running the two different kinds of SEIR modeling jobs supported by the COVIDScenarioPipeline repository on AWS:
Inference jobs, using AWS Batch to coordinate hundreds/thousands of jobs across a fleet of servers, and
Planning jobs, using a single relatively large EC2 instance (usually an
r5.24xlarge) to run one or more planning scenarios on a single high-powered machine.
Most of the steps required to setup and run the two different types of jobs on AWS are identical, and I will explicitly call out the places where different steps are required. Throughout the document, we assume that your client machine is a UNIX-like environment (e.g., OS X, Linux, or WSL).
Local Client Setup
I need a few things to be true about the local machine that you will be using to connect to AWS that I'll outline here:
You have created and downloaded a
.pemfile for connecting to an EC2 instance to your~/.sshdirectory. When we provision machines, you'll need to use the.pemfile as a secret key for connecting. You may need to change the permission of the .pem file:You have created a
~/.ssh/configfile that contains an entry that looks like this so we can usestagingas an alias for your provisioned EC2 instance in the rest of the runbook:You can connect to Github via SSH. This is important because we will need to use your Github SSH key to interact with private repositories from the
stagingserver on EC2.
Provisioning The Staging Server
If you are running an Inference job, you should use a small instance type for your staging server (e.g., an m5.xlarge will be more than enough.) If you are running a Planning job, you should provision a beefy instance type (I am especially partial to the memory-and-CPU heavy r5.24xlarge, but given how fast the planning code has become, an r5.8xlarge should be perfectly adequate.)
If you have access to the jh-covid account, you should use the IDD Staging AMI (ami-03641dd0c8554e5d0) to provision and launch new staging servers; it is already setup with all of the dependencies described in this section, however you will need to alter it's default network settings, iam role and security group(Please refer this page in details). You can find the AMI here, select it, and press the Launch button to walk you through the Launch Wizard to choose your instance type and .pem file to provision your staging server. When going through the Launch Wizard, be sure to select Next: Configure Instance details instead of Review and Launch. You will need to continue selecting the option that is not Review and Launch until you have selected a security group. In these screens, most of the default options are fine, but you will want to set the HPC VPC network, choose a public subnet (it will say public or private in the name), and set the iam role to EC2S3FullAccess on the first screen. You can also name the machine by providing a Name tag in the tags screen. Finally, you will need to set your security group to dcv_usa and/or dcv_usa2. You can then finalize the machine initialization with Review and Launch. Once your instance is provisioned, be sure to put its IP address into the HostName section of the ~/.ssh/config file on your local client so that you can connect to it from your client by simply typing ssh staging in your terminal window.
If you are having connection timeout issues when trying to ssh into the AWS machine, you should check that you have SSH TCP Port 22 permissions in the dcv_usa/ security group.
If you do not have access to the jh-covid account, you should walk through the regular EC2 Launch Wizard flow and be sure to choose the Amazon Linux 2 AMI (HVM), SSD Volume Type (ami-0e34e7b9ca0ace12d, the 64-bit x86 version) AMI. Once the machine is up and running and you can SSH to it, you will need to run the following code to install the software you will need for the rest of the run:
Connect to Github
Once your staging server is provisioned and you can connect to it, you should scp the private key file that you use for connecting to Github to the /home/ec2-user/.ssh directory on the staging server (e.g., if the local file is named ~/.ssh/id_rsa, then you should run scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa staging:/home/ec2-user/.ssh to do the copy). For convenience, you should create a /home/ec2-user/.ssh/config file on the staging server that has the following entry:
This way, the git clone, git pull, etc. operations that you run on the staging server will use your SSH key without constantly prompting you to login. Be sure to chmod 600 ~/.ssh/config to give the new file the correct permissions. You should now be able to clone a COVID19 data repository into your home directory on the staging server to do work against. For this example, to use the COVID19_Minimal repo, run:
to get it onto the staging server. By convention, we do runs with the COVIDScenarioPipeline repository nested inside of the data repository, so we then do:
to clone the modeling code itself into a child directory of the data repository.
Getting and Launching the Docker Container
The previous section is only for getting a minimal set of dependencies setup on your staging server. To do an actual run, you will need to download the Docker container that contains the more extensive set of dependencies we need for running the code in the COVIDScenarioPipeline repository. To get the development container on your staging server, please run:
There are multiple versions of the container published on DockerHub, but latest-dev contains the latest-and-greatest dependencies and can support both Inference and Planning jobs. In order to launch the container and run a job, we need to make our local COVID19_Minimal directory visible to the container's runtime. For Inference jobs, we do this by running:
The -v option to docker run maps a file in the host filesystem (i.e., the path on the left side of the colon) to a file in the container's filesystem. Here, we are mapping the /home/ec2-user/COVID19_Minimal directory on the staging server where we checked out our data repo to the /home/app/src directory in the container (by convention, we run commands inside of the container as a user named app.) We also map our .ssh directory from the host filesystem into the container so that we can interact with Github if need be using our SSH keys. Once the container is launched, we can cd src; ls -ltr to look around and ensure that our directory mapping was successful and we see the data and code files that we are expecting to run with.
Once you are in the src directory, there are a few final steps required to install the R packages and Python modules contained within the COVIDScenarioPipeline repository. First, checkout the correct branch of COVIDScenarioPipeline. Then, assuming that you created a COVIDScenarioPipeline directory within the data repo in the previous step, you should be able to run:
to install the local R packages and then install the Python modules.
Once this step is complete, your machine is properly provisioned to run Planning jobs using the tools you normally use (e.g., make_makefile.R or running simulate.py and hospdeath.R directly, depending on the situation.) Running Inference jobs requires some extra steps that are covered in the next two sections.
Running Inference Jobs
Once the container is setup from the previous step, we are ready to test out and then launch an inference job against a configuration file (I will use the example of config.yml for the rest of this document.) First, I setup and run the build_US_setup.R script against my configuration file to ensure that the mobility data is up to date:
Next, I kick off a small local run of the full_filter.R script. This serves two purposes: first, we can verify that the configuration file is in good shape and can support a few small iterations of the inference calculations before we kick off hundreds/thousands of jobs via AWS Batch. Second, it downloads the case data that we need for inference calculations to the staging server so that it can be cached locally and used by the batch jobs on AWS- if we do not have a local cache of this data at the start of the run, then every job will try to download the data itself, which will force the upstream server to deny service to the worker jobs, which will cause all of the jobs to fail. My small runs usually look like:
This will run two sequential simulations (-k 2) for a single slot (-n 1) using a single CPU core (-j 1), looking for the modeling source code in the COVIDScenarioPipeline directory (-p COVIDScenarioPipeline). (We need to use the command line arguments here to explicitly override the settings of these parameters inside of config.yml since this run is only for local testing.) Assuming that this run succeeds, we are ready to kick off a batch job on the cluster.
The COVIDScenarioPipeline/batch/inference_job.py script will use the contents of the current directory and the values of the config file and any commandline arguments we pass it to launch a run on AWS Batch via the AWS API. To run this script, you need to have access to your AWS access keys so that you can enable access to the API by running aws configure at the command line, which will prompt you to enter your access key, secret, and preferred region, which should always be us-west-2 for jh-covid runs. (You can leave the Default format entry blank by simply hitting Enter.) IMPORTANT REMINDER: (Do not give anyone your access key and secret. If you lose it, deactivate it on the AWS console and create a new one. Keeep it safe.)
The simplest way to launch an inference job is to simply run
This will use the contents of the config file to determine how many slots to run, how many simulations to run for each slot, and how to break those simulations up into blocks of batch jobs that run sequentially. If you need to override any of those settings at the command line, you can run
to see the full list of command line arguments the script takes and how to set them.
One particular type of command line argument cannot be specified in the config: arguments to resume a run from a previously submitted run. This takes two arguments based on the previous run:
Both the s3 bucket and run id are printed as part of the output for the previous submission. We store that information on a slack channel #csp-production, and suggest other groups find similar storage.
Inference jobs are parallelized by NPI scenarios and hospitalization rates, so if your config file defines more than one top-level scenario or more than one set of hospitalization parameters, the inference_job.py script will kick off a separate batch job for the cross product of scenarios * hospitalizations. The script will announce that it is launching each job and will print out the path on S3 where the final output for the job will be written. You can monitor the progress of the running jobs using either the AWS Batch Dashboard or by running:
which will show you the running status of the jobs in each of the queues.
Operating Inference Jobs
By default, the AWS Batch system will usually run around 50% of your desired simultaneously executable jobs concurrently for a given inference run. For example, if you are running 300 slots, Batch will generally run about 150 of those 300 tasks at a given time. If you need to force Batch to run more tasks concurrently, this section provides instructions for how to cajole Batch into running harder.
You can see how many tasks are running within each of the different Batch Compute Environments corresponding to the Batch Job Queues via the Elastic Container Service (ECS) Dashboard. There is a one-to-one correspondence between Job Queues, Compute Environments, and ECS Clusters (the matching ones all end with the same numeric identifier.) You can force Batch to scale up the number of CPUs available for running tasks by selecting the radio button corresponding to the compute environment that you want to scale on the Batch Compute Environment dashboard, clicking Edit, increasing the Desired CPU (and possibly the Minimum CPU, see below), and clicking the Save button. You will be able to see new containers and tasks coming online via the ECS Dashboard after a few minutes.
If you want to force new tasks to come online ASAP, you should consider increasing the Minimum CPU for the Compute Environment as well as the Desired CPU (the Desired CPU is not allowed to be lower than the Minimum CPU, so if you increase the Minimum you must increase the Desired as well to match it.) This will cause Batch to spin new containers up quickly and get them populated with running tasks. There are two downsides to doing this: first, it overrides the allocation algorithm that makes cost/performance tradeoff decisions in favor of spending more money in order to get more tasks running. Second, you must remember to update the Compute Environment towards the end of the job run to set the Minimum CPU to zero again so that the ECS cluster can spin down when the job is finished; if you do not do this, ECS will simply leave the machines up and running, wasting money without doing any actual work. (Note that you should never manually try to lower the value of the Desired CPU setting for the Compute Environment- the Batch system will throw an error if you attempt to do this.)
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