On Saturday, April 17, 2010, Robert Bradshaw <rober...@math.washington.edu> wrote: > 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. >
The mainnbottlekneck is architecture, design and implementation. A computer like boxen could support hundreds of simultaneous users robustly with some improvements to the structure of the software. William > - 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 > ------- > > -----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 > > > -- > 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 > -- William Stein Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org -- 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
