Ubuntu Natty Narwhal Cluster Compute Instances

Some time ago, Amazon announced two new instance types aimed at high performance computing. The new types differ from Amazon's previous offerings in that

• They use Xen "hvm" (Hardware Virtualization Mode) rather than 'paravirtualization'
  
• Only priviledged accounts can create images of the 'hvm' virtualization-type.
  

The result is that there are very few public images for cluster compute nodes, and up until today, there were no Ubuntu images.

I'm happy to announce that you can now run Official Ubuntu images on cluster compute instance types. From today forward we will be publishing daily builds of Natty Narwhal builds.

These images are identical to the other Ubuntu images. For AMI ids, you can browse the list at http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/server/natty/current/, or use more machine friendly data at http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/query.

There is one known bug (bug 690286) that prevents you from using ephemeral storage on the CC nodes.

If you've got a couple dollars burning a whole in your pocket, you can try one out with:

qurl="http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/query/"
ami_id=$(curl --silent "${qurl}/natty/server/daily.current.txt" |
    awk '-F\t' '$11 == "hvm" && $7 == "us-east-1" { print $8 }')
ec2-run-instances --key mykey --instance-type cc1.4xlarge "${ami_id}"