Setting-up-your-Manager-Instance.rst

Setting up your Manager Instance

Launching a "Manager Instance"

Warning

These instructions refer to fields in EC2's new launch instance wizard. Refer to version 1.13.4 of the documentation for references to the old wizard, being wary that specifics, such as the AMI ID selection, may be out of date.

Now, we need to launch a "Manager Instance" that acts as a "head" node that we will ssh or mosh into to work from. Since we will deploy the heavy lifting to separate c5.4xlarge and f1 instances later, the Manager Instance can be a relatively cheap instance. In this guide, however, we will use a c5.4xlarge, running the AWS FPGA Developer AMI. (Be sure to subscribe to the AMI if you have not done so. See ami-subscription. Note that it might take a few minutes after subscribing to the AMI to be able to launch instances using it.)

Head to the EC2 Management Console. In the top right corner, ensure that the correct region is selected.

To launch a manager instance, follow these steps:

1. From the main page of the EC2 Management Console, click Launch Instance ▼ button and click Launch Instance in the dropdown that appears. We use an on-demand instance here, so that your data is preserved when you stop/start the instance, and your data is not lost when pricing spikes on the spot market.
2. In the Name field, give the instance a recognizable name, for example firesim-manager-1. This is purely for your own convenience and can also be left blank.
3. In the Application and OS Images search box, search for FPGA Developer AMI - 1.11.1-40257ab5-6688-4c95-97d1-e251a40fd1fc and select the AMI that appears under the *Community AMIs* tab (there should be only one). DO NOT USE ANY OTHER VERSION. For example, do not use FPGA Developer AMI from the AWS Marketplace AMIs tab, as you will likely get an incorrect version of the AMI.
4. In the Instance Type drop-down, select the instance type of your choosing. A good choice is a c5.4xlarge (16 cores, 32 GiB) or a z1d.2xlarge (8 cores, 64 GiB).
5. In the Key pair (login) drop-down, select the firesim key pair we setup earlier.
6. In the Network settings drop-down click edit and modify the following settings:
   1. Under VPC - required, select the firesim VPC. Any subnet within the firesim VPC is fine.
   2. Under Firewall (security groups), click Select existing security group and in the Common security groups dropdown that appears, select the firesim security group that was automatically created for you earlier.
7. In the Configure storage section, increase the size of the root volume to at least 300GB. The default of 85GB can quickly become too small as you accumulate large Vivado reports/outputs, large waveforms, XSim outputs, and large root filesystems for simulations. You should remove the small (5-8GB) secondary volume that is added by default.

8. In the Advanced details drop-down, we'll leave most settings unchanged. The exceptions being:

   1. Under Termination protection, select Enable. This adds a layer of protection to prevent your manager instance from being terminated by accident. You will need to disable this setting before being able to terminate the instance using usual methods.

   2. Under User data, paste the following into the provided textbox:

   When your instance boots, this will install a compatible set of all the dependencies needed to run FireSim on your instance using conda.

9. Double check your configuration. The most common misconfigurations that may require repeating this process include:
   1. Not selecting the firesim vpc.
   2. Not selecting the firesim security group.
   3. Not selecting the firesim key pair.
   4. Selecting the wrong AMI.
10. Click the orange Launch Instance button.

Access your instance

We HIGHLY recommend using mosh instead of ssh or using ssh with a screen/tmux session running on your manager instance to ensure that long-running jobs are not killed by a bad network connection to your manager instance. On this instance, the mosh server is installed as part of the setup script we pasted before, so we need to first ssh into the instance and make sure the setup is complete.

In either case, ssh into your instance (e.g. ssh -i firesim.pem centos@YOUR_INSTANCE_IP) and wait until the /machine-launchstatus file contains all the following text:

$ cat /machine-launchstatus
machine launch script started
machine launch script completed

Once this line appears, exit and re-ssh into the system. If you want to use mosh, mosh back into the system.

Key Setup, Part 2

Now that our manager instance is started, copy the private key that you downloaded from AWS earlier (firesim.pem) to ~/firesim.pem on your manager instance. This step is required to give the manager access to the instances it launches for you.

Setting up the FireSim Repo

We're finally ready to fetch FireSim's sources. Run:

git clone https://github.com/firesim/firesim cd firesim # checkout latest official firesim release # note: this may not be the latest release if the documentation version != "stable" git checkout ./build-setup.sh fast

The build-setup.sh script will validate that you are on a tagged branch, otherwise it will prompt for confirmation. This will have initialized submodules and installed the RISC-V tools and other dependencies.

Next, run:

source sourceme-f1-manager.sh

This will have initialized the AWS shell, added the RISC-V tools to your path, and started an ssh-agent that supplies ~/firesim.pem automatically when you use ssh to access other nodes. Sourcing this the first time will take some time -- however each time after that should be instantaneous. Also, if your firesim.pem key requires a passphrase, you will be asked for it here and ssh-agent should cache it.

Every time you login to your manager instance to use FireSim, you should ``cd`` into your firesim directory and source this file again.

Completing Setup Using the Manager

The FireSim manager contains a command that will interactively guide you through the rest of the FireSim setup process. To run it, do the following:

firesim managerinit --platform f1

This will first prompt you to setup AWS credentials on the instance, which allows the manager to automatically manage build/simulation nodes. See https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/tutorial-ec2-ubuntu.html#configure-cli-launch-ec2 for more about these credentials. When prompted, you should specify the same region that you chose above and set the default output format to json.

Next, it will prompt you for an email address, which is used to send email notifications upon FPGA build completion and optionally for workload completion. You can leave this blank if you do not wish to receive any notifications, but this is not recommended. Next, it will create initial configuration files, which we will edit in later sections.

Now you're ready to launch FireSim simulations! Hit Next to learn how to run single-node simulations.