Overview of Using CASA on AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) allows researchers to use instances for NRAO data processing. This section presents readying an Instance to process a data set with CASA. The CASA tutorial will be used as a demonstration of running CASA on AWS.

Choose an Instance

The tutorial does not require an instance with a lot of CPU and RAM. Per the hardware requirements page section on memory: https://casa.nrao.edu/casa_hardware-requirements.shtml#mem  500MB per core is adequate. An m4.xlarge is more than adequat and costs $0.24/hour. It has 2 cores and 16 GB RAM. A smaller instance such as m4.large would probably work as well, except it has 1 core and could not run things in parallel.

Get Ready to Start an Instance

Follow the directions on the AMI page to locate an NRAO AMI. Select the AMI, and from the Actions menu, choose Launch. Select the m4.xlarge image type, which, as mentioned above, should be adequate for the tutorial at 2 cores and 8 GB/core. After that, we often press the "Review and Launch" button to skip to the end of the process. However, we need to add some storage first.

Start an Instance with Some Extra Storage Space

Select "4. Add Storage" at the top. You can see the root volume is by default 8 GB. For the tutorial, we might get by with 8 GB, but enlarging the root volume will remove any doubt. Change 8 to 1024 (the upper limit for the root volume). You might notice a checkbox called "Delete on Termination". For root volumes, this is the default. Unchecking it causes the root volume to persist after shutdown of the instance. The charges for storing a terminated instance are minimal compared to the charge for a running one. The user (or a coworker with adequate privileges) can mount the EC2 volme on another instance. After making this selection, click Review and Launch. Then click "Launch". You are asked for the ssh key pair that will allow ssh access to the instance you are about to start. If possible, use an existing key pair. Click Launch to start the instance.

Logging into Your Instance

Once the instance has had a couple of minutes to start, you can see in the instances screen the running (and recently terminated) instances. Your instance is identifiable by the Key Name and the fact that under Status Checks it says "Initializing." Copy the external IP address and login to the instance: ssh -i ~/.ssh/mykeyname.pem centos@my-IP-address.  If your login is not immediate, try again in a minute or so.

Using an NRAO AMI to start an instance brings up an instance with CASA already installed. Everything you need to run CASA should be there except for the data, which will be downloaded directly to the instance in the next step.

Downloading the Data

In this example we'll be using the VLA high frequency Spectral line tutorial.

You can bring up that page in a browser on your host computer, there's no need to launch a browser on the AWS instance.

Section 2 "Obtaining the Data" of the tutorial lists the URL where the data can be found and is repeated below.  Once you've logged into your instance you can retreive and unpack the data with the commands below.  If you've attached a seperate storage device to the instance you should cd to where it was mounted to ensure the data is written to that device.  See the storage section for more details.

Launching and Running CASA

Typing 'casa' in the terminal will start the pre-installed version of casa. The first time it is run, it will take a few minutes to initialize. An Ipython interpreter for CASA will eventually open, ready for commands to CASA. (The CASA log window should display as well.)

Display the antenna map

Plot the MeasurementSet, amplitude vs. uv-distance

Flag data

Transfer data

When you are done with your instance and want to move the data on its root volume to your local storage, you can use scp -r or rsync -a .