If this is really as easy (and cheap) as it sounds, I think we should consider running the public notebook in the cloud. I wonder if there's an educational discount, grant money for this, or both?
On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 7:29 PM, Dan Drake <dr...@kaist.edu> wrote: > The current thread about using the notebook server with classes of > students made me think about the possibility of using Amazon EC2 > instances to do the computing for a notebook server. > > I haven't used EC2 and don't know too much about it, but the idea seem > to be that you can spin up a web-accessible virtual machine very easily > -- it seems to be about as hard as creating a Google group. You pay for > the VM by the hour. > > The notebook server does its computing by ssh'ing to an account and > running Sage there. Imagine you provision a bunch of EC2 machines with a > copy of Sage, and point the notebook server to those machines. If your > notebook server needs more power, you just make some more EC2 machines. > You only pay for what you use, so this seems like it could be a very > effective and efficient way to run a heavily-used notebook server. > > I looked up prices, and it looks like about 17 cents an hour for a "CPU > intensive" instance. If 20 students each used a notebook server and each > accessed their own instance, that's $3.40 for each class hour. For a > 45-hour semester-long class, that's roughly $150, which seems pretty > cheap. (Consider that for some classes, a single *textbook* is $150.) > > Has anyone experimented with using EC2 and Sage? It seems like an > interesting possibility. > > Dan > > -- > --- Dan Drake > ----- http://mathsci.kaist.ac.kr/~drake > ------- > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) > > iEYEARECAAYFAkvJHO0ACgkQr4V8SljC5LoSoACgn1C0EpmWV4iJR14TABJTHm9M > GgsAn3pVpvTUpgoV7M+GQU9fOMLD4gc1 > =Y4VQ > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > > -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
