[ale] shared research server help

[DJ-Pfulio]

No guessing, Chuck. We are old.

In my school, we had to sign up for seats at a computer.  There were 4
computers and 80+ students. Getting 2 hrs a week was difficult, since
only 1 kid in school had a computer at home.
 The business department had 25 $3000 computers that were used to teach
typing.  Nothing else.  Really pissed me off.

Compiles for "hello world" were 45 minutes.  Links were also 45 minutes.

At my first college, the computer that ran programs was in a different
building from where any card punch machines.  There was usually a 15
person line to hand your deck to the operator ... for the 30 seconds it
took to run my programs - or more likely - get an error printout over
some stupid mistake.

At the next college, we had CDC mainframes with terminals spread all
over campus and dial-up capabilities.  1200 baud rocked, but the
disconnections sucked.

On 10/04/2017 09:12 PM, Chuck Payne wrote:
> WOW, I guess I am old, I remember back in college, I had to schedule
> time on the mainframe, I hate that machine but I had to use for my
> business clas. If it were an Apple II or Tandy 1000, as long as lab was
> open, we could use it. Just on the Tandy, had to remember the park
> command when powering them down. DOS 2.5. 
> 
> I was so happy I had my little Atari ST 1040, though I should have
> seriously study C at the pick, instead of playing Phatasy 3. 
> 
> 
> On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 6:48 PM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com
> <mailto:jim.kinney at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     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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> 
> -- 
> Terror PUP a.k.a
> Chuck "PUP" Payne
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