Hi, The computer combinat.math.washington.edu is down... again. Sort of. It responds to ping requests, but I can't ssh in.
I suspect that not a lot of people are actively using it lately, since this is the second time it has gone down for over a week in the last 3 months, and nobody (except my student Hao Chen), seems to have noticed. I'm considering doing the following. I'll shutdown combinat completely, reformat the disk, and set it up as a node of the cloud.sagemath.com (SMC). It'll still have the amazing 64 cores and huge (192GB) RAM. However, instead of login in directly to it, people can email me to request that I move a particular SMC project to combinat. It will then have access to expanded compute resources. The advantage of this, is that it is much easier for me to maintain. In particular, SMC has automated scripts to take care of using cgroups to explicitly limit usage of compute resources by a given project, I have extensive monitoring code in place so I know when things go down, and I everything runs in virtual machines, so when there are problems I can easily fix them in a few minutes remotely. Also, it's much easier to grant fair usage to projects. As it is now with default linux on combinat, basically any user can just bring down the computer by using too much memory/disk/whatever, which is probably what happened in this case (I don't know). Thoughts? Obviously, this may be a bit slower and the max memory will be less (as things are in a VM) for specific research-level computations. However, a working computer is way better than a regularly-crashing computer, in my opinion. Also, given the weeks of downtime that nobody (except Hao) notices, maybe people aren't using combinat at all anyways, due to it being only a remote linux box. Personally, I think SMC makes using remote Linux boxes much easier. -- William -- William Stein Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-combinat-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-combinat-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-combinat-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-combinat-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
