StarCluster VolumeCreator AWS instance_type

Question

When attempting to create an EBS shared volume for all nodes in a StarCluster, the StarCluster createvolume command launches an AWS EC2 instance as the volume creator. However, the default instance type that is used for this is t1.micro, which is no longer available in the AWS availability zone (us-east-1f in my case). Is it possible to specify a different default instance type to use? t2.small, for example?

Answer 1

I was able to find a work-around. While t1.micro instances were not available in AWS zone us-east-1f, they are still available in us-east-1d. So, I created the shared EBS volume there (and, to speed up data transfers to and from this volume, I changed my StarCluster config file to request that cluster nodes be launched in that same zone (us-east-1d)).

Still, if anyone knows an answer to the original question, I would prefer to be able to create EBS volumes and launch a cluster in the availability zone of my choice, and that would require being able to specify an instance type to use for the VolumeCreator node that is launched to create the EBS volume when the "$ starcluster createvolume" command is used. IMO, this should be a config file setting or, at a minimum, an optional argument to pass to the createvolume command.