This is a console application which bootstraps a cloud/cluster run of APSIM. It takes a single .apsimx file as input, and spins up many VMs (pods) in a kubernetes cluster (one per simulation in the .apsimx file). It also starts a "relay" pod which can act as an intermediary to/from the other pods in the cluster.
Before running the bootstrapper, you need to initialise the nodes in your cluster as required for the job. The bootstrapper will start pods/containers, but these require that nodes already exist in the cluster on which they can be run. See here for instructions on doing this with the NECTAR research cluster.
To run a debug build of the bootstrapper on a local machine, you will need kubectl (the kubernetes CLI), minikube (a kubernetes cluster which runs on a local machine) and docker (minikube supports multiple container runtimes, but this tool only supports docker). Once these are in place, you will need to start minikube, and will almost certainly need to start a proxy server to the kubernetes API server as well. Finally, it's also recommended to start the kubernetes dashboard in order to monitor and diagnose any jobs started with the bootstrapper.
minikube start
kubectl proxy &
kubectl dashboard &
The ApsimX repository needs to be cloned as a sibling directory to this repository. Once this is done, just build APSIM.Bootstrapper.csproj with .NET CLI or your IDE of choice.
The project supports a few command-line arguments. These may be viewed with the --help flag. The only essential argument is the input file, which may be specified using the -f flag:
dotnet run -- -f /path/to/input/file.apsimx
dotnet /path/to/APSIM.Bootstrapper.dll -f /path/to/input/file.apsimx
Currently this requires code changes for use in a non-minikube kubernetes environment (e.g. a real cluster).
The bootstrapper doesn't really do anything useful by itself. It provides the tools needed to setup a cluster environment as needed for a job involving apsim. The bootstrapper should ultimately be a class library, but I'm leaving it as a console application for now, for demonstrative purposes.