Jetstream Unofficial Addon for Atmosphere VM(s)

Abstract

Jetstream provides researchers and students with a unique approach to cloud computing and data analysis on demand. Moving away from a job submission model which is more pervasive on High-Performance Cluster computing this allows users to create user-friendly installs of “virtual machines” which can then be custom installed with softwares and packages and even imaged further to make science replicable. The system in theory also allows a BYoOS (Bring your own Operating System) designed to further allow more flexibility while sharing the backbone of high performance compute and cloud storage infrastructure. The idea of imaging a system allows the user to not only share their data or analysis but their entire setup that allows them to run the analysis making it a plug and play model in terms of research replication and transference. As the NSF project proceeds further it allows users to apply for grants or allocation time on the machines and indeed renew these free of cost for researchers and students.While working on my projects I realized it would be easier to query the number of instances and volumes running on my account, my burn rate and left over allocation over time. And something useful was the possibility to perform system actions such as shutdown(stop), restart, start, reboot among others programmatically. It is with this idea that I approach the API backend at JetStream and built just a few tools to allows users to perform these actions without the need to log into their web browsers and allows the user to call upon instance actions through a command line interface (CLI).The tool creates a payload which carries the then creates get or post requests allowing us to perform these actions.