Re: [sage-devel] Sage and Amazon EC2?
On Saturday, April 17, 2010, Robert Bradshaw 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 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
Re: [sage-devel] Sage and Amazon EC2?
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 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
Re: [sage-devel] Sage and Amazon EC2?
I haven't used Sage on EC2 but I have done Axiom builds there (about a 1.5 hour compile/test). Its simple to configure a machine. They have hundreds of prebuilt instances. I used an ubuntu instance, ssh'ed to it, added a few packages, did a build and test. Worked as expected with no problems. If you're used to working on linux nothing should come as a surprise. Tim Daly Dan Drake 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 --- -- 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
Re: [sage-devel] Sage and Amazon EC2?
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 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
[sage-devel] Sage and Amazon EC2?
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 --- signature.asc Description: Digital signature
