StarCluster is a utility for creating traditional computing clusters used in research labs or for general distributed computing applications on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It uses a simple configuration file provided by the user to request cloud resources from Amazon and to automatically configure them with a queuing system, an NFS shared /home directory, passwordless SSH, OpenMPI, and ~140GB scratch disk space. It consists of a Python library and a simple command line interface to the library. For end-users, the command line interface provides simple intuitive options for getting started with distributed computing on EC2 (i.e. starting/stopping clusters, managing AMIs, etc). For developers, the library wraps the EC2 API to provide a simplified interface for launching/terminating nodes, executing commands on the nodes, copying files to/from the nodes, etc.
