This is meant to be an overview of the features that Genesis Cloud Compute Service has to offer.
Instances
The accelerator hardware that Genesis Cloud provides is organized in what is called an instance. Think of it as the remote machine that serves at your command. You can set the specs of this machine when you create an instance. You can access an instance once its state has turned to active.
You can find a guide to how to start an instance here.
As long as the instance is active it will count towards your billing.
if you are done with your work for now but want to continue at a later date, you can stop your instance. All the data on it will be preserved and billing will stop.
Connecting to your instance
To take control of the instance you need to establish a SSH connection. To authenticate yourself when establishing the connection you need to either have a key-pair uploaded or set a password. Here is a guide on how to to that. If you want you can also set up a graphical user interface later on but we strongly recommend using SSH and the command line. For many data science applications running a jupyter notebook on your instance might also be useful.
Volumes
You might have large datasets that need to be accessed by multiple instances or still be reachable when you took the associated instances down. To make managing large datasets easy we support Volumes that you can mount to any instance you want. Also: they persist when you shut down the instance and can store up to half a Terabyte.
Here is a guide on how to get started.
Images and Snapshots
Most instances start as a clean slate with either Ubuntu 16 or Ubuntu 18 installed. If you want to use one of the prominent machine learning libraries like Tensorflow or PyTorch you can also use one of the preconfigured images. When you start an instance this way you can start training your models right out of the box.
Let's say you finished installing some software you want to continue doing so but also later return to this state. That's what snapshots are for. It let's you save all the content of the hard drive associated with your instance. You can then recreate that exact instance at a later date however many times you want.
Find your way around snapshots.
Networking
Think of security groups as the rules that determine what kind of traffic is allowed in and out of your instance. They control what ports are allowing incoming or outgoing traffic to go through. The standard security group allows every outgoing traffic on every port, incoming traffic via TCP on Ports 443 and 80 as well as SSH connections on Port 22.
You can easily create new security groups that can then be applied to as many instances as you want.
For connecting your local machine with a remote instance you use the public IP. Additionally, there is a private network between all your instances that allows them to communicate. The connection then never leaves our data center so it's really quick and also never exposed to outsiders that might want to listen in.
Developer API
The developer API allows you to do most of the things you would normally do by using our GUI, but you without using the GUI. This can for example be helpful when you want to automate instance creation.