On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 8:35 AM, djamous <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Hello, > > Here at Harvard, we're interested in using SAGE for a Physical > Sciences course this fall. The course is part of a series of > introductory college physics and chemistry courses intended to > students in the life sciences (including pre-meds). >
Cool. I started the Sage project when I was an Assistant prof at Harvard. Arthur Gaer -- the sysadmin of the math department at Harvard -- has often been very helpful with build and other support for the project. > We want to provide a computational element to the labs and provide a > gentle introduction to programming concepts and techniques. Some of > the exercises we envision for the students will include: > - plotting data > - file I/O > - random number generation > - numerical integration of equations of motion (this would be the most > advanced exercise) > > We like the idea of using python for that purpose and the SAGE > environment appears very attractive, in part because it saves us the > step of asking students to install python and related modules on their > own machines. > > My question to the group is: given that the class has about 200 > students, do we run the risk of overloading the server if, in the > worst-case scenario, all students are running their programming > exercises at the same time? Yes. Sage-3.0.4 is much better in this regard than previous versions. But certainly 200 people running code all on the same machine at the same time would be a disaster. One can configure the server to run all sage processes distributed on a cluster though, which could possibly mitigate this sum. What are you hardware resources like? > We will, of course, encourage them to > install SAGE on their own machines to alleviate that risk. Yep. And also installing Sage in some of the computer labs in the science center. That said, Sage currently does not support Windows well (Microsoft is funding a port, but it isn't done). Sage is excellent on OS X (and linux), and I recall that there are many OS X machines in the science center. > A related > question is: how do you deal with security on the SAGE server (say how > do you prevent a user from running malignant scripts after registering > and logging in)? It's sort of impossible to give a user the *full* experience of using sage of the network, and at the same time bar malignant scripts, so instead we just take a bunch of precautions. What we do is: (1) run the server in a chroot jail, (2) run all user code as a (pool of) separate users from the server, (3) limit the amount of ram user code can use, (4) make all processes spawned by a user stop a few minutes after the user stops viewing the sage notebook with their web browser. Thus a user certainly could run malignant scripts. In your situation, since the users are all students at the university who would anyways be entitled to accounts on Harvard computers, you really don't have to worry too much about them running malignant code, since they could already just do that in their own accounts. It's much more of an issue with sagenb.org. In your application, we could probably do something where each student's code in the notebook maps exactly to a unix user account created for that student (by "maps exactly", I mean it runs in that user account). Note that there are people working on improving the sage notebook right now -- two are even being paid. So we definitely want to hear about the changes needed to make sage work for you. > Thanks for any info you can share on these topics... > > We're very excited at the prospect of using SAGE. > > Daniel Jamous, Ph.D. > Senior Specialist for Instructional Computing in the Sciences and > Social Sciences > Instructional Computing Group > FAS Information Technology > Harvard University > > 617-495-7571 > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://icg.fas.harvard.edu > > > > -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-edu" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-edu?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
