# Setting up a cluster on Amazon AWS/Azure
**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/setting-up-a-cluster-on-amazon-aws-azure/38624
**Category:** Offtopic
**Created:** [May 2, 2020, 8:00pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/setting-up-a-cluster-on-amazon-aws-azure/38624 "2020-05-02T20:00:39Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@affans](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/affans)
#### Post date: [May 2, 2020, 8:00pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/setting-up-a-cluster-on-amazon-aws-azure/38624/1 "2020-05-02T20:00:39Z")
Our university cluster is down and I have some time sensitive simulations I have to run. I looked into AWS and Azure, but never have really dealt with cloud computing… I need about 500 processors (simulation time is actually really low, maybe 5 minutes)…
Does anyone have any experience setting up Julia on a cloud host? I am thinking I need to spin up a virtual machine, install an OS on it, install Julia, and use `addprocs(500)` to add my 500 processors, but not sure if AWS/Azure will automatically allocate 500 processors?
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### Author:  [@tbeason](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/tbeason)
#### Post date: [May 2, 2020, 10:50pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/setting-up-a-cluster-on-amazon-aws-azure/38624/2 "2020-05-02T22:50:44Z")
Absolutely no experience with this, but maybe have a look at [AWS ParallelCluster - Amazon Web Services](https://aws.amazon.com/hpc/parallelcluster/)?
To get something with less setup time, you could pick the largest EC2 instance which has like 100 cores and run it there perhaps?
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### Author:  [@johnh](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/johnh)
#### Post date: [May 5, 2020, 7:42pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/setting-up-a-cluster-on-amazon-aws-azure/38624/3 "2020-05-05T19:42:25Z")
I have run up a few pcluster clusters on Amazon.
Do you still need help here?
As @tbeason says if you can run on 64 cores, or around that number, allocating a single Intel or AMD Rome architecture server may do the job.
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### Author:  [@affans](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/affans)
#### Post date: [May 5, 2020, 11:34pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/setting-up-a-cluster-on-amazon-aws-azure/38624/4 "2020-05-05T23:34:41Z")
Sure, 64 cores sounds okay… the run time will just be a little bit longer. Is there a way to only pay for the actual compute times used? Or does it start billing as soon as you spin up the VM?
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### Author:  [@tbeason](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/tbeason)
#### Post date: [May 5, 2020, 11:45pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/setting-up-a-cluster-on-amazon-aws-azure/38624/5 "2020-05-05T23:45:09Z")
The billing is for as long as the machine is active – whenever you “possess” the resources. They don’t care if you use it or not 🙂