Mike Gerdts wrote:
> On 9/8/07, Richard Elling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Changing the topic slightly, the strategic question is:
>> why are you providing disk space to students?
>
> For most programming and productivity (e.g. word processing, etc.)
> people will likely be better suited by having network access for their
> personal equipment with local storage.
Most students today are carrying around more storage in their pocket
than they'll get from the university.
> For cases when specialized expensive tools ($10k + per seat) are used,
> it is not practical to install them on hundreds or thousands of
> personal devices for a semester or two of work. The typical computing
> lab that provides such tools is not well equipped to deal with
> removable media such as flash drives.
I disagree, any lab machine bought in the past 5 years or so has a USB
port, even SunRays.
> Further, such tools will often
> times be used to do designs that require simulations to run as batch
> jobs that run under grid computing tools such as Grid Engine, Condor,
> LSF, etc.
Yes, but you won't have 15,000 students running grid engine. But even
if you do, you can adopt the services models now prevalent in the
industry. For example, rather than providing storage for a class, let
Google or Yahoo do it.
> Then, of course, there are files that need to be shared, have reliable
> backups, etc. Pushing that out to desktop or laptop machines is not
> really a good idea.
Clearly the business of a university has different requirements than
student instruction. But even then, it seems we're stuck in the 1960s
rather than the 21st century.
I think I might have some home directory somewhere at USC, where I
currently attend, but I'm not really sure. I know I have a (Sun-based :-)
email account with some sort of quota, but that isn't implemented as a
file system quota. I keep my stuff in my pocket. This won't work entirely
for situations like Steve's compute cluster, but it will for many.
There is also a long tail situation here, which is how I approached the
problem at eng.Auburn.edu. 1% of the users will use > 90% of the space. For
them, I had special places. For everyone else, they were lumped into large-ish
buckets. A daily cron job easily identifies the 1% and we could proactively
redistribute them, as needed. Of course, quotas are also easily defeated
and the more clever students played a fun game of hide-and-seek, but I
digress. There is more than one way to solve these allocation problems.
The real PITA was cost accounting, especially for government contracts :-(
The cost of managing the storage is much greater than the cost of the
storage, so the trend will inexorably be towards eliminating the management
costs -- hence the management structure of ZFS is simpler than the previous
solutions. The main gap for .edu sites is quotas which will likely be solved
some other way in the long run... Meanwhile, pile on
http://bugs.opensolaris.org/view_bug.do?bug_id=6501037
-- richard
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