If you have an Amazon Web Services account you can get started with running Ufora at scale within minutes.

The pyfora package includes an auxiliary script called pyfora_aws that helps with getting started on AWS.

What You Need to Get Started

## AWS Account You’ll need an AWS account with an access key that has permission to launch EC2 instances. If don’t yet have an access key, follow these instructions to create one.

Python

Ufora’s python client, pyfora, requires CPython 2.7.

Note: Python 3 is not supported yet.

Important: Only official CPython distributions from python.org are supported at this time. This is what OS X and most Linux distributions include by default as their “native” Python.

Install pyfora

$ [sudo] pip install pyfora

Launch Ufora Instances

Credentials

We use Boto to interact with EC2 on your behalf. If you already have a Boto configuration file with your credentials then no additional configuration in needed. Otherwise, you can set your credentials using the environment variables: AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY.

To set the envrionment variables, open a terminal window and type:

$ export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=<your aws access key id>
$ export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=<your aws secret key>

Start Ufora Instance

You are now ready to start some instances using pyfora_aws. In the same terminal window run:

$ pyfora_aws start --ec2-region <region>
Launching ufora manager...
Ufora manager started:
    i-90c57f54 | 52.26.77.142 | running | manager

Where <region> is the name of an AWS region (e.g. us-west-2, eu-central-1, etc.)

This command starts one on-demand c3.8xlarge instance and configure it to run the Ufora backend. It may take a couple of minutes to run. The first two segments in the last line of output are the EC2 instance-id and the instance’s public IP address.

For a full description of pyfora_aws and its various options see this page.

Run Some Code

You are now ready to connect pyfora to your running instance and run some code.

Create a new Python file called tryfora.py with the following content, replacing <ip_address> with the public IP address of your running instance:

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import pyfora

ufora = pyfora.connect('http://<ip_address>:30000')

def isPrime(p):
    x = 2
    while x*x <= p:
        if p%x == 0:
            return 0
        x = x + 1
    return 1

print "Counting primes..."
with ufora.remotely.downloadAll():
    result = sum(isPrime(x) for x in xrange(10 * 1000 * 1000))

print result

Congratulations! You just ran your first Ufora computations and counted the number of primes between 0 and 10 million. The computation inside the with block (line 15) was shipped to the Ufora cluster running in AWS, which then compiled it to efficient machine code and ran it parallel on all cores available on your machine.

Stop Ufora Instance

To stop all your running Ufora instances, run:

$ pyfora_aws stop --ec2-region <region>