EC2 Cluster (via Dask)#
To launch a multi-node cluster on AWS EC2 we recommend you use Dask Cloud Provider, a native cloud integration for Dask. It helps manage Dask clusters on different cloud platforms.
Local Environment Setup#
Before running these instructions, ensure you have installed RAPIDS.
Note
This method of deploying RAPIDS effectively allows you to burst beyond the node you are on into a cluster of EC2 VMs. This does come with the caveat that you are on a RAPIDS capable environment with GPUs.
If you are using a machine with an NVIDIA GPU then follow the local install instructions. Alternatively if you do not have a GPU locally consider using a remote environment like a SageMaker Notebook Instance.
Install the AWS CLI#
Install the AWS CLI tools following the official instructions.
Install Dask Cloud Provider#
Also install dask-cloudprovider and ensure you select the aws optional extras.
$ pip install "dask-cloudprovider[aws]"
Cluster setup#
We’ll now setup the EC2Cluster from Dask Cloud Provider.
To do this, you’ll first need to run aws configure and ensure the credentials are updated. Learn more about the setup. The API also expects a security group that allows access to ports 8786-8787 and all traffic between instances in the security group. If you do not pass a group here, dask-cloudprovider will create one for you.
from dask_cloudprovider.aws import EC2Cluster
cluster = EC2Cluster(
instance_type="g4dn.12xlarge", # 4 T4 GPUs
docker_image="rapidsai/base:24.12a-cuda12.5-py3.12",
worker_class="dask_cuda.CUDAWorker",
worker_options={"rmm-managed-memory": True},
security_groups=["<SECURITY GROUP ID>"],
docker_args="--shm-size=256m",
n_workers=3,
security=False,
availability_zone="us-east-1a",
region="us-east-1",
)
Warning
Instantiating this class can take upwards of 30 minutes. See the Dask docs on prebuilding AMIs to speed this up.
If you have non-default credentials you may need to pass your credentials manually.
Here’s a small utility for parsing credential profiles.
import os
import configparser
import contextlib
def get_aws_credentials(*, aws_profile="default"):
parser = configparser.RawConfigParser()
parser.read(os.path.expanduser("~/.aws/config"))
config = parser.items(
f"profile {aws_profile}" if aws_profile != "default" else "default"
)
parser.read(os.path.expanduser("~/.aws/credentials"))
credentials = parser.items(aws_profile)
all_credentials = {key.upper(): value for key, value in [*config, *credentials]}
with contextlib.suppress(KeyError):
all_credentials["AWS_REGION"] = all_credentials.pop("REGION")
return all_credentials
cluster = EC2Cluster(..., env_vars=get_aws_credentials(aws_profile="foo"))
Connecting a client#
Once your cluster has started you can connect a Dask client to submit work.
from dask.distributed import Client
client = Client(cluster)
import cudf
import dask_cudf
df = dask_cudf.from_cudf(cudf.datasets.timeseries(), npartitions=2)
df.x.mean().compute()
Clean up#
When you create your cluster Dask Cloud Provider will register a finalizer to shutdown the cluster. So when your Python process exits the cluster will be cleaned up.
You can also explicitly shutdown the cluster with:
client.close()
cluster.close()