On Oct 6, 2008, at 10:21 AM, Jason Grout wrote: > William Stein wrote: >> 2008/10/6 Thierry Dumont <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: >>> I would like to know if someone as used Sage with undergraduate >>> students. My question is mainly a question about the material which >>> would be necessary. >>> >>> We are currently building a project (this means: asking for >>> money, doing >>> a lot a bureaucracy and so on) on Sage in my University: the idea >>> is to >>> start the replacement of the current commercial system (Maple) >>> by Sage. >>> Nowadays, students use Maple on a network of Windows machines. >>> We would >>> like to make a large Sage server so that all the students use the >>> web >>> interface. >>> >>> I can add to Sage an identification on the ldap server (actually >>> active >>> directory) of the University, and Sage accounts will be created >>> automatically. >>> >>> The more difficult question for us is: which machine? One can >>> expect to >>> have about 200 students using Sage at the same time, with large >> >> There is no way you can have 200 students all using exactly one >> sage notebook server on the same port *at the same time* and >> have it feel snappy still. I've done classes with 30 people at once >> and that worked OK -- the server I used was sage.math (16 1.8Ghz >> opterons from 2005). If you ran say 6 different servers, even on the >> same hardware, at once, that would probably work fairly well. >> Probably using two of the 8-core 32GB of RAM machines you list >> below, with say three sage notebook servers on each, would work >> reasonably well. >> >> If you publish the relevant notebooks the students need, and >> just redirect students from some master login page to one of those >> six distinct servers, this could work pretty well. >> >>> subgroups of students doing the same thing at the same time. Ok, >>> as it >>> is undergraduate students, they will not make very large >>> computations... >>> But what about the "scalability" of Sage, of the web server? >> >> To emphasize again, I doubt it scales to more than 30 users all >> hammering >> the server at once. >> >>> We are currently looking at machines with 2x4 core processors, 32 >>> gb of >>> RAM, 2x450 Gb of disk (raid1). Larger machines exists, but are >>> extremely >>> expensive. We can ask for two machines like this. >>> >>> As anyone some experience in this domain? >> >> sagenb.org obviously has a lot of usage. >> I basically started it as a server from scratch >> 1 month ago, and over 750 people created >> accounts on it during the last month. > > > Can anyone comment on the possibility of running 25-30 sage sessions > from the command line on a modest configuration? In other words, > is the > problem in running 25-30 sage processes, or is the bottleneck in the > webserver and notebook interface?
Yep, I remember someone a while back was going to convert the interface to use a database backend to make it scale better, but I don't think it ever got finished. As a workaround, you could start up several notebooks at once and assign 20 or so students per port, which should work fine. - Robert --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-support@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
