Setting Up SuperVessel and SSh connection to the Machines on Debian Based

SuperVessel is a cloud based plataform created by IBM Research - China It allows you to set up containers on the cloud to run experiments, test aplications, do some data analysis and so on. One great feature of SuperVessel is to allow FPGA and GPU acelleration for C/C++ aplications.

Creating an acount on SuperVessel

First, go to the page below:

https://ptopenlab.com/cloudlabconsole/?cm_mc_uid=35942743919214714482383&cm_mc_sid_50200000=1471628149#/

When you reach this adress, you will see that the first item of the Service Zone is for SuperVessel Cloud. Click on Apply VM -> Direct Acces. After doing that, you can login, or create an account. You can login as Community user . Do one of these steps and you have an SuperVessel account. This wil allow you to use all the other services on the page, like Acceleration and Big Data Services.

Setting up a Machine

After creating an account, you’re good to launch a machine. On the left side of the page, click on Instances. On the up menu of the page, there is a Current Region box. Make sure it is assigned to Beijing so we can access the machines via SSH easily. Now, click on Launch Instance. This should redirect you to a page with the specs of the machine on it. On the first drop-down menu, select Launch Docker Image and choose the specs that best fit your needs and then click on the button on the bottom of the forms to launch the instance and wait. It will appear a box with the instance’s information. If you want to access the machine from the browser, go to More Actions -> Console. The informations to log in appear on the top of the terminal.

Connecting VPN

First, install the VPNC:

sudo apt-get install vpnc

Then, create a SuperVessel conf file with the following command:

sudo vim /etc/vpnc/supervessel.conf

Note: you can use any editor, just don’t forget to run with sudo or as root user. The content of this file has to be:

IPSec gateway 36.110.51.131
IPSec ID Gemini    
IPSec secret G3m!ni1bmVpn           
Xauth username PoXXXX (change PoXXXX to your own VPN account)    
Xauth password secret_password (change secret_passsword to your own VPN password) 

The Xauth username and password have to be changed to your personal informattion, that you can find at the person symbol ate the upper left of the SuperVessel page, that you used to create an instance. Click on VPN Conf and put the Beijing fields on the supervessel.conf file. Now, run the vpnc:

sudo vpnc-connect supervessel.conf

A message like that should appear:

VPNC started in background (pid: 12434)...

Running SSH

Now, on the Instances page, find the External IP(VPN) field. Now run:

ssh opuser@ExternalIP 

Note: change ExternalIP with the number you just saw. You can use ssh -X to xforward and ssh -C to compress connection.

After you logout, don’t forget to run :

sudo vpnc-disconnect

That should do the work!

Post written by Guilherme Lucas. You can see some of my work at https://github.com/Guilhermeslucas .