MachineGroup Class

A Machine Group is a pool of homogeneous machines that work individually and which do not communicate with each other in any way. Launching a Machine Group allows the creation of a private queue that only receives the tasks you specifically send to them. Then, the machines can pick simulations from the queue, which allows to run multiple simulations in parallel and speeds up the exploration of a design space.

Instantiating a MachineGroup object

The following parameters can be configured:

• the machine_type defines the type of CPU used for each machine. This parameter follows the naming convention set by Google Cloud, e.g., c2-standard-16. This convention is composed of a prefix that defines the CPU series, a suffix that sets the number of virtual CPUs (vCPU) per machine and the middle word refers to the level of RAM per vCPU. In the example, c2 refers to an Intel Xeon Scalable processor of 2nd generation, standard means 4 GB of RAM per vCPU and will contain 16 vCPUs. Check out the complete machine catalog available via the API.
• the zone allows to select the zone where the machines will be launched. By default, machines are launched in the europe-west1-b zone.
• the num_machines sets the number of machines available in the computational resource. While the computational resource is active, these machines will be reserved for the user.
• the data_disk_gb allows the selection of the size of the disk attached to each machine that is reserved for the simulation data in GB.
• the spot argument determines if the machines will be preemptible or standard. Preemptible machines can be stopped at any time and for that reason are only advised for fault-tolerant workloads. If simulations are running when they are stopped, the simulation is resubmitted to the queue of the machine group again.
• the max_idle_time determines the time a machine group can remain idle (without receiving any task) before it is terminated. By default, this value is 3 minutes.
• the auto_terminate_ts defines the moment in time in which the resource will be automatically terminated, even if there are tasks still running.

For example, the following code creates a MachineGroup with 2 machines of type c2-standard-16 with 100 GB of disk space each:

import inductiva

machine_group = inductiva.resources.MachineGroup(
    machine_type="c2-standard-16",
    num_machines=2,
    data_disk_gb=100,
    spot=False)

machine_group.start()  # start the MachineGroup

Creating an instance of MachineGroup does not start the machines. This only registers the configuration on the API, which can now be used to manage it further.

Managing the Machine Group

Visit our Manage Resources guide to learn how to monitor and control your MachineGroup resources.