Category: AWS Batch

In this blog post, we help you understand the AWS Batch job termination process and how you may take actions to gracefully terminate a job by capturing SIGTERM signal inside the application. It provides you with an efficient way to exit your Batch jobs. You also get to know about how job timeouts occur, and how the retry operation works with both traditional AWS Batch jobs and array jobs.

Ampersand is a data-driven TV advertising technology company that provides aggregated TV audience impression insights and planning on 42 million households, in every media market, across more than 165 networks and apps and in all dayparts (broadcast day segments). The Ampersand Data Science team estimated that building their statistical models would require up to 600,000 physical CPU hours to run, which would not be feasible without using a massively parallel and large-scale architecture in the cloud. AWS Batch enabled Ampersand to compress their time of computation over 500x through massive scaling while optimizing their costs using Amazon EC2 Spot. In this blog post, we will provide an overview of how Ampersand built their TV audience impressions (“impressions”) models at scale on AWS, review the architecture they have been using, and discuss optimizations they conducted to run their workload efficiently on AWS Batch.

This post covers the different ways you can encode a dependency between basic and array jobs in AWS Batch. We also cover why you may want to encode dependencies outside of Batch altogether using a workflow system like AWS Step Functions or Apache Airflow.

In this post, I cover some of the recent updates to AWS Batch, including improvements to job placement, addition of AWS PrivateLink support, and the new capabilities to update your AWS Batch compute environments.

Matt Rasmussen, VP of Software Engineering at insitro, expands on his first post on redun, insitro’s data science tool for bioinformatics, to describe how redun makes use of advanced AWS features. Specifically, Matt describes how AWS Batch’s Array Jobs is used to support workflows with large fan-out, and how AWS Glue’s DynamicFrame is used to run computationally heterogenous workflows with different back-end needs such as Spark, all in the same workflow definition.

Matt Rasmussen, VP of Software Engineering at insitro describes their recently released, open-source data science framework, redun, which allows data scientists to define complex scientific workflows that scale from their laptop to large-scale distributed runs on serverless platforms like AWS Batch and AWS Glue. I this post, Matt shows how redun lends itself to Bioinformatics workflows which typically involve wrapping Unix-based programs that require file staging to and from object storage. In the next blog post, Matt describes how redun scales to large and heterogenous workflows by leveraging AWS Batch features such as Array Jobs and AWS Glue features such as Glue DynamicFrame.

It’s an understatement that AWS has a lot of services (more than 200 at the time of this post!). We’re usually the first to point out that there’s more than one way to solve a problem. HPC is no different in this regard, because we offer a choice: customers can run their HPC workloads using AWS […]

Introduction Monte Carlo methods are a class of methods based on the idea of sampling to study mathematical problems for which analytical solutions may be unavailable. The basic idea is to create samples through repeated simulations that can be used to derive approximations about a quantity we’re interested in, and its probability distribution. In this […]

We have been working with a team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute, helping them adopt the AWS cloud for drug research applications in the pharmaceutical industry. In this post, we’ll focus on how the team at Max Planck obtained thousands of EC2 Spot Instances spread across multiple AWS Regions for running their compute intensive simulations in a cost-effective manner, and how their solution will be enhanced further using the new Spot Placement Score API.

Today we are announcing fair-share scheduling (FSS) for AWS Batch, which provides fine-grain control of the scheduling behavior by using a scheduling policy. With FSS, customers can prevent “unfair” situations caused by strict first-in, first-out scheduling where high priority jobs can’t “jump the queue” without draining other jobs first. You can now balance resource consumption between groups of workloads and have confidence that the shared compute environment is not dominated by a single workload. In this post, we’ll explain how fair-share scheduling works in more detail. You’ll also find a link to a step-by-step workshop at the end of this post, so you can try it out yourself.