Google Cloud Marketplace Entry

The Center for High-Throughput Computing maintains a Google Cloud Marketplace entry for a HTCondor-in-the-Cloud. This web-based tool automates the process of starting a complete (Linux) HTCondor pool on the Google Cloud Platform.

You will need a Google Cloud Platform account and a GCP project in which to place the newly-constructed pool.

Instructions

  1. Log into the Gooogle Cloud Platform

  2. Go to the Marketplace entry.

  3. Click the blue LAUNCH button.

  4. Select a project in which to place the new pool.

  5. You’ll be taken to a new screen, where you should update the ‘administrator e-mail address field’.

  6. You may update any of the other fields, but the only ones we recommend changing are under the ‘Condor Compute’ section. You should never need to change the values under ‘Condor Master’ section, and only but rarely the values under ‘Condor Submit’ (primarily to give yourself a larger disk).

  7. Click the blue DEPLOY button.

  8. You’ll be taken to a new screen, where you should wait for a while as Google gets your machines started. The text at the top of the middle column will change to ‘… has been deployed’ when everything’s ready to go.

  9. You may want to bookmark this page for future reference.

  10. Halfway down the right column, a new option should appear, labelled ‘Get started with HTCondor on GCP’. Click on the ‘SSH TO CONDOR SUBMIT NODE’ link. This will open a browser window that functions like an SSH client, and you can use the gear icon in the upper-right corner to upload and download files.

At this point, you can start using HTCondor as normal. When you’re done – and have downloaded any files you want from the submit node – you can click the DELETE button at the top of center column to clean everything up (and stop being charged). Select the first option (“… and all resources…”) and click the DELETE ALL button.