Create a key pair
To deploy clusters, Amazon ParallelCluster launches Amazon EC2 instances to create the cluster head node and compute nodes. To perform cluster tasks, such as running and monitoring jobs, or managing users, you must be able to access the cluster head node. To verify you can access the head node instance using SSH, you must use an Amazon EC2 key pair. To learn how to create a key pair, see Create a key pair in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide for Linux Instances.