Customizing your HPC environment: building AMIs for AWS Parallel Computing Service

This article discusses the importance of customizing Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for optimizing HPC environments in AWS Parallel Computing Service (PCS). It covers the rationale for custom AMIs and the key steps involved in creating them.

Specifically, the article covers:

• Why custom AMIs matter in PCS, including the diversity of operating systems, software stacks, performance optimizations, and compliance/security needs across different HPC workloads
• A high-level overview of building custom AMIs, from choosing a base AMI to installing core components like EFA, Lustre, PCS agent, and HPC software stack
• The power of using Spack, an open-source package manager, for simplifying the installation of complex HPC software stacks
• Approaches to automating AMI creation, such as Infrastructure as Code (IaC), HashiCorp Packer, and AWS Image Builder
• The importance of conquering custom AMIs for improving productivity, ensuring reproducibility, enabling auditing and documentation, and allowing HPC environments to evolve rapidly