On Apr 16, 2010, at 8:02 PM, Tom Boothby wrote:
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?
As far as I understand, there's a requirement to have a shared
filesystem for compute nodes, but it's be great to get rid of it. I
wonder if it's the computation or the server itself that's the
bottleneck for large numbers of accounts. Has anyone looked into this?
(May be as easy as doing a long, cumulative top on the notebook
server.) For example, my (extreemly limited) impression is that it
works a lot better when a whole class is hacking away at problems in
worksheets compared to everyone trying to sign up for an account at
once.
- Robert
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
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