[ale] shared research server help

[Jim Kinney]

ulimit is a way to set soft and hard limits on resource usage including
RAM consumed.

On Wed, 2017-10-04 at 17:32 -0500, Todor Fassl wrote:
> I manage a group of research servers for grad students at a university. 
> The grad students use these machines to do the research for their Ph.D 
> theses. The problem is that they pretty regularly kill off each other's 
> programs by using up all the ram. Most of the machines have 256G of ram. 
> One kid uses 200Gb and another 100Gb and one or the other, often both, 
> die. Sometimes they bringthe machines down by hogging the cpu or using 
> up all the ram. Well, the machines never crash but they might as well be 
> down.
> 
> We really, really don't want to force them to use a scheduling system 
> like slurm. They are just learnng and they might run the same piece of 
> code 20 times in an hour.
> 
> Is there a way to set a limit on the amount of ram all of a user's 
> processes can use? If so, we were thinking of setting it at 50% of the 
> on-board ram. Then it would take 3 students together to trash a machine. 
> It might still happen but it would be a lot more infrequent.
> 
> Any other suggestions? Anything at all? Just keep in mind that we really 
> want to keep it easy for the students to play around.
> 
> 
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