Gurobi Instant Cloud#
Gurobi Instant Cloud allows you to start and stop Gurobi Compute Servers on the cloud. You can start multiple machines without the need for your own hardware or local Gurobi licenses. Computations are seamlessly offloaded to these servers. Depending on your cloud license type, these machines provide the full set of Compute Server features, including queuing, load balancing, and distributed parallel computing. For a detailed manual refer to the Gurobi Instant Cloud Guide.
Overview
When using the Instant Cloud, there are always three systems involved: your client machine, the Gurobi Instant Cloud Manager, and a cloud Compute Server.
The program that requests a Gurobi Instant Cloud machine and submits optimization models to this server runs on your client machine. Note, however, that this program does not actually need to be aware that it will be using Gurobi Instant Cloud. You have a few options for configuring the client to use the Instant Cloud. The simplest and most seamless is to set up a cloud license file. The alternative is to use a programming language API, which gives your program additional control over how it uses the cloud. Details on launching cloud machines from your client program follow shortly.
The Gurobi Instant Cloud Manager manages the configuration and launching of cloud machines. Your client program will send credential information to this website, along with a request to launch an Instant Cloud machine. The specific action taken in response to this request depend on configuration information that you manage through the website. For each license, you set up things like the number of servers to launch, the types and geographic regions of these machines, the maximum number of simultaneous jobs to run on each server, etc.
Once the Instant Cloud Manager launches the requested Compute Servers, it passes information about these servers back to your client program. The client program then directly interacts with the servers, sending the Gurobi model, launching a solve on the model, requesting solution information, etc. As with any Gurobi Compute Server, this process is entirely transparent to the client program.
Now that we’ve given a high-level description of the overall process, we need to cover a few important details.
Client Setup#
As noted previously, a client program that wishes to launch a Gurobi Instant Cloud machine must pass credential information to the Instant Cloud Manager. Every Instant Cloud license has such credentials associated with it. This information is captured in a pair strings, an access ID and a secret key. These strings can be retrieved from your account on the Gurobi Instant Cloud Manager. Note that you shouldn’t share these credentials with others, since anyone who knows these two strings can launch Instant Cloud machines in your account.
Once you have the credentials associated with your license, there are two ways to configure your client program to use them. The simplest is to use a cloud license file. This is just like any other Gurobi license file, except that its fields are specific to the cloud. A cloud license file will contain two lines with credential information:
CLOUDACCESSID=312e9gef-e0bc-4114-b6fb-26ed7klaeff9
CLOUDKEY=ae32L0H321dgaL
It may also contain an optional third line:
CLOUDPOOL=pool1
We’ll discuss cloud pools a bit later. You can download a gurobi.lic file containing this information from the Instant Cloud website, or you can create one yourself in a text editor. If you follow the standard process for setting up a Gurobi license file (refer to the Quick Start Guide for details), then Gurobi will automatically use the Instant Cloud rather than running locally.
The other option for passing credential information to the Instant Cloud Manager is programmatically via parameters. Use the configuration parameters to set access ID and secret key.
Instant Cloud Setup#
As noted previously, cloud configuration is done via the Gurobi Instant Cloud Manager. The client program requests that a cloud machine be launched, but the Instant Cloud Manager determines exactly how to respond to that request.
One essential concept when configuring your Instant Cloud license is the notion of a cloud pool. Pools allow you to create multiple configurations within a single cloud license. For example, you may set up one pool for jobs in the US and another for jobs in Europe, or one for short-running jobs and another for long-running jobs, or one for single-machine jobs and another for distributed parallel jobs. For each of the available cloud configuration options (which will be discussed below), you can select different values for different pools. Every license always has a default pool, which comes pre-configured with what we consider to be reasonable default values. Thus, you always have the option of ignoring cloud pools and simply using the default pool if you don’t need multiple configurations.
The main things that a user may want to configure on the Instant Cloud website are the idle shutdown time, the number of machines to launch, the number of distributed workers to launch, the machine region, and the machine type. These can take different values in different pools.
The idle shutdown time is a vital concept in the Instant Cloud. When a client program requests a cloud server, it takes some time (typically less than 2 minutes) to launch that server. Rather than forcing client programs to incur this delay each time they run, the Gurobi Instant Cloud leaves a server running until is has been idle for the specified idle shutdown time. In this way, later client programs may find a cloud server already available. You can set this to a small value if you want your server to shut down immediately after your job finishes, or to a very large value if you want your server to always be available.
Another configuration option is the number of machines associated with the pool. Gurobi Compute Server automatically handles queuing and load balancing between servers, so launching multiple machines allows you to distribute the work of many simultaneous client programs among them. A pool can also be configured to launch any number of distributed workers, if you want to use distributed computing.
Cloud machines can be launched in multiple geographic regions, including the US, Europe, Asia, and South America. You should visit the website to see the full list. We offer several options for machine type, although we’ve chosen what we believe is the best general-purpose machine for running Gurobi as the default, so you are unlikely to want to change this setting.