First-time AWS User Setup

If you’ve never used AWS before and don’t have an account, follow the instructions below to get started.

Creating an AWS Account

First, you’ll need an AWS account. Create one by going to aws.amazon.com and clicking “Sign Up.” You’ll want to create a personal account. You will have to give it a credit card number.

Requesting Limit Increases

AWS limits access to particular instance types for new/infrequently used accounts to protect their infrastructure. You can learn more about how these limits/quotas work here.

You should make sure that your account has the ability to launch a sufficient number of instances to follow this guide by looking at the “Service Quotas” page in the AWS Console, which you can access here. Be sure that the correct region is selected once you open this page.

The values listed on this page represent the maximum number vCPUs of any of these instances that you can run at once, which will limit the size of simulations (e.g., number of parallel FPGAs) that you can run. If you need to increase your limits, follow the instructions below.

To complete this guide, you need to have the following limits:

  • Running On-Demand F instances: 64 vCPUs.

    • This is sufficient for 8 parallel FPGAs. Each 8 vCPUs = one FPGA.

  • Running On-Demand Standard (A, C, D, H, I, M, R, T, Z) instances: 24 vCPUs.

    • This is sufficient for one c5.4xlarge manager instance and one z1d.2xlarge build farm instance.

If you have insufficient limits, request a limit increase by following these steps: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-resource-limits.html#request-increase

In your request, enter the vCPU limits for the two instance classes shown above. This process sometimes has a human in the loop, so you should submit it ASAP. At this point, you should wait for the response to this request.

Hit Next below to continue.