Setting up a Customized Cluster

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This tutorial assumes you already have computers accessible to you so you can connect to them and configure them for use with Essentia. If this is not the case:

  • On the Azure Cloud, follow the instructions in Azure Install for each additional computer you want to add to your cluster and use for scaling your analyses.


Let’s say we have a master node (M), and several worker nodes (W). To configure your system to utilize this full compute cluster, do the following steps:

  1. Create ‘ec2-user’ user on all the nodes (M + W). Right now, only the user ‘ec2-user’ is supported.
  2. Configure the nodes so M can ssh to W using a pem file just like AWS EC2:
    • Generate the key with ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 2048 -v on M or use a pem file from AWS EC2. Type ENTER to accept the default key file setting ‘~/.ssh/id_rsa’ and then type ENTER two more times to make an empty passphrase. If you use a pem file from EC2, you can create the corresponding pub file from ~/.ssh/authorized_keys.

      Note: Make sure your key file ends with ‘.pem’. If it does not, run mv YOUR_PATH/my-certificate YOUR_PATH/my-certificate.pem.

    • Upload the public certificate to each W: ssh-copy-id -i YOUR_PATH/ ec2-user@W_IP (Running once for each worker node you want to add and replacing ‘W_IP‘ with your worer node’s public IP). If you used the default key file above then you would run ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/ ec2-user@Worker_IP for each W.
    • Make the .pem file on your M read-only chmod 400 YOUR_PATH/my-certificate.pem.
    • Confirm you can login to each W by running ssh -i YOUR_PATH/my-certificate.pem ec2-user@W_IP (no password should be needed).

      Note: Don’t change the default ssh port number (22).

  3. Install Essentia on all the nodes (M + W) by following the instructions for your chosen method in Installation. Azure Install users can skip this step.
  4. Run ess -v on each node to confirm the Essentia installation was successful. You should receive output in the form of:
Essentia : Your_Version

AQ Tools : Your_Version --- Date
  1. Go to your working directory on your M:
    • Run ess cluster set custom.
    • Copy your pem file to the .conf subdirectory.
    • Inside the .conf subdirectory, create a file named “reservation.json” with the following content:
"id": "my_id",
"pem": "pem_file_name",
"ip_list": ["W1_IP","W2_IP", ...]

For example, in your .conf folder, you should have at least three files:


and reservation.json can look something like below:

"id": "my_id",
"pem": "dev",
"ip_list": ["","",""]

  1. Run ess cluster status on your M, you should get something like:
    Summary for cluster my_id
ID state publicIP privateIP cpu mem disk
master running [0.0] 20.1 10.7
worker-1 running [0.0] 27.8 10.1
worker-2 running [0.0] 27.8 10.1
worker-3 running [0.0] 27.8 10.1
  1. Your customized cluster is ready to use now. You can just use Essentia as if a cluster existed

    Note: The ess cluster [create|start|stop|terminate] commands do not apply in the ‘custom’ setting.