Our group has an AWS account managed by Cornell’s central contract.

Getting Access

There’s an Active Directory group at Cornell called en-cs-sampson-aws-users; members of this group can access the AWS account. Adrian can add you to the group using Cornell’s AD manager thingy. The IT staff can also add you to the group (if you file a ticket).

Using the AWS Account

Go to signin.aws.cucloud.net to get authenticated via Cornell LDAP and then redirected to the AWS console.

EC2

When you use EC2, please remember to stop your instances when you’re not using them. Especially for more expensive types like F1, leaving instances turned on is like leaving the tap running: even $1.65/hour adds up to about $40/day, for example.

Even “stopped” instances cost something to preserve their storage, but it’s less of a big deal—on the order of 50¢/day, in our experience. Even so, please “terminate” (i.e., destroy) your instances if you’re not going to need them again for a while.

F1

F1 instances have Xilinx FPGAs. Our account has permission to use a handful of F1 instances at a time. These links might be useful:

• Xilinx’s own guides to F1 are step-by-step walkthroughs. They are annoyingly voluminous in their detail, and they use the SDAccel GUI.
• Mike Taylor’s group at UW also has an F1 “walkthrough tutorial.” It’s focused on RTL, not HLS.

Account Logistics

The AWS account is registered to capra@cornell.edu, which is an Exchange Group Account (EGA). All the email from AWS goes to this account. Adrian or Shailja can probably add new people to this group via Cornell’s Exchange Account Manager.