[Axiom-developer] Re: [sage-devel] Sage and Amazon EC2?

[Tim Daly]

I haven't used Sage on EC2 but I have done Axiom builds there
(about a 1.5 hour compile/test). Its simple to configure a machine.
They have hundreds of prebuilt instances. I used an ubuntu instance,
ssh'ed to it, added a few packages, did a build and test.
Worked as expected with no problems.

If you're used to working on linux nothing should come as a surprise.

Tim Daly


Dan Drake wrote:
> The current thread about using the notebook server with classes of
> students made me think about the possibility of using Amazon EC2
> instances to do the computing for a notebook server.
>
> I haven't used EC2 and don't know too much about it, but the idea seem
> to be that you can spin up a web-accessible virtual machine very easily
> -- it seems to be about as hard as creating a Google group. You pay for
> the VM by the hour.
>
> The notebook server does its computing by ssh'ing to an account and
> running Sage there. Imagine you provision a bunch of EC2 machines with a
> copy of Sage, and point the notebook server to those machines. If your
> notebook server needs more power, you just make some more EC2 machines.
> You only pay for what you use, so this seems like it could be a very
> effective and efficient way to run a heavily-used notebook server.
>
> I looked up prices, and it looks like about 17 cents an hour for a "CPU
> intensive" instance. If 20 students each used a notebook server and each
> accessed their own instance, that's $3.40 for each class hour. For a
> 45-hour semester-long class, that's roughly $150, which seems pretty
> cheap. (Consider that for some classes, a single *textbook* is $150.)
>
> Has anyone experimented with using EC2 and Sage? It seems like an
> interesting possibility.
>
> Dan
>
> --
> ---  Dan Drake
> -----  http://mathsci.kaist.ac.kr/~drake
> -------
>