Setup and creation of an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for Mosel

The AEC2 settings are stored in a set of configuration files. The 'aec2setup' program will configure your AWS account as needed and create these configuration files. One of the tasks performed by this program is to create a dedicate AMI running the Linux operating system. To this end, an Xpress Linux package (either 32bit or 64bit depending on the needs) together with its associated license file are required to run the program.

To run the setup program, copy into the same directory the Xpress Linux archive (file name in the form "xp?.?.?_linux*_setup.tar"), the "xpauth.xpr" license and the "aec2setup" program itself then, from a command prompt type:

aec2setup

During the process, the program will ask various questions, in most cases a default answer is provided (noted in square brackets): simply hit enter if you do not know what to do. As part of the procedure a virtual machine is started in the Cloud and Xpress is installed on it in order to create the AMI to be used later on. Note that:

• starting a virtual machine and creating the AMI may be quite long operations (up to several minutes): do not interrupt the program during these operations
• in case of failure, you can restart the program: it will recover information already setup.

Once the setup has completed, the following files have been created:

• "aec2.aid" the secret key-pair to access your AWS account. This file must be kept secret as it gives full access to your AWS account
• "aec2.ask" the private key to log into virtual machines. The information stored in this file cannot be regenerated. If it is lost or corrupted, a new security credential will have to be created (i.e. delete the file and re-run aec2setup)
• "aec2.acf" the main configuration file (that references the 2 others)

These 3 files are required by the AEC2 package when running a model using it.