Using Cloudbank

Using Cloudbank

1. WARNING: ANY USE OF CLOUDBANK MUST INCLUDE THAT YOU HAVE A DEEP UNDERSTANDING HOW CHARGES ARE DONE. WASTEFUL USE OF RESOURCES WHICH COST REAL $ WILL RESULT IN AN IMMEDIATE TERMINATION OF YOUR ACCOUNT. Any cost above $100 over the semester must be preapproved and accompanied by a detailed cost breakdown.
2. Students need to create an account on https://cloudbank.org with their university e-mail. Please follow the instructions.
3. If multiple students need an account all students must have completed step 1 before we proceed.
4. All names and emails as entered in Cloudbank must be forwarded to Gregor and Bud.

Activating your Cloudbank account with our project

4. Gregor will activate your Cloudbank account in the Cloudbank project. You do not have to do anything but wait. Gregor will notify Bud.
5. Bud will add you to AWS via Cloudbank. He will try to limit your spending amount to $100 initially. You do not have to do anything but wait.
6. Bud will notify you and Gregor once this is done.
7. This process is done on best effort and as we have never done it it may take some time to complete. We anticipate a week.

What to do while you wait

8. Find out which services you need on AWS
9. Find out what they cost as we have to pay for it in $ this needs to be estimated precisely
10. If it exceeds $100 you need to figure out why and estimate the total cost over the entire semester as we do not have unlimited funds.
11. Make sure you understand running costs and startup costs for a service. Note: starting a service every second will cost a lot!
12. Learn that you must not place keys and certs in your gitrepos. Figure out where to place them
13. If you need ssh and use Windows use gitbash.
14. Improve this tutorial and make pull pull request with your improvement.

Pitfalls

1. Ignore reading the documentation
2. Not understanding ssh kegen, ssh agent, ssh-add
3. On Windows: Juts using putty and not understanding gitbash
4. Placeing any key in your project code other then reading them from a secure filesystem.
5. Not understanding what 1-4 is about.

Alternatives

1. Try to use alternatives whenever you can
2. Spark is available on Rivanna
3. Hadoop development can be done on Windows, Mac, Linux (Search in google how to set it up). Development is often easier on your laptop. Once you complete it use cloudbank.
4. MPI is available on Rivanna
5. TF and pytorch is available on Rivanna
6. Jupyter notebooks can be run on Rivanna or Google Collab

Honor Policy

1. The project you do must be part of an approved project.
2. You must not use cloudbank and its clouds for personal projects.
3. You must not use cloudbank and its clouds for bitcoin mining.
4. In case publications and reports be written based on usage form our cloudbank account, you must include it in an Acknowledgement statement and notify us with a copy of the report. Please note that the report may be made publically available.