a. Create a Cluster

ParallelCluster UI

In this section we’re going to use ParallelCluster UI to create a cluster from a sample template we’ve provided.

You can take your pick of either the p4d.24xlarge, p4de.24xlarge (80GB version) or the p5.48xlarge instance, all NVIDIA based instances with the following specs:

Instance Size Cores Memory (GiB) GPU GPU memory GPUDirect RDMA GPU Peer to Peer On-demand Price/hr Cluster Config
p4d.24xlarge 96 1152 8 x A100 320 GB HBM2 Yes 600 GB/s NVSwitch $32.77 Download Template
p4de.24xlarge 96 1152 8 x A100 640 GB HBM2 Yes 600 GB/s NVSwitch $40.96 Download Template
p5.48xlarge 192 2 TB 8 x H100 640 GB HBM3 Yes 900 GB/s NVSwitch $98.32 Download Template

  1. Click Create Cluster > Select With a template. You’ll be prompted to provide a file, download the template linked in the table above and select that file.

  2. On the Cluster page fill out the following:

    • Name the cluster ml-cluster (or whatever you want to name it)
    • Select Ubuntu 20.04
    • Select the VPC, ML VPC created in b. Create VPC

    Cluster Wizard

    On the next few screens, we’ll modify the account specific components and leave the rest as specified by the template.

  3. On the Head node page we’ll set the following:

    • Set the Head node instance type, we recommend leaving the default c5.xlarge
    • Select a public Subnet from ML VPC created in b. Create VPC. This should be in the same Availability Zone as your capacity.
    • Optionally set the Keypair to None, we’ll add a key later in C. Connect to the Cluster Cluster Wizard

  4. On the Queues page we’ll leave most things as default making sure that:

    • Memory based scheduling is Enabled
    • The subnet is the Private Subnet from the ML VPC
    • The GPU Instance type is correct (from the template)
    • EFA is enabled

    Cluster Wizard

  5. Keep the defaults on the storage tab and click Next

  6. Set the AMI Id of the Custom Image we created previously. This has to be done directly in the yaml file in the Image section like so:

    Image:
    Os: ubuntu2004
    CustomAmi: ami-0528af10692058c25 # <= add this line

    Cluster Wizard

  7. Proceed to the next page to configure your Capacity Reservation.