Hi Dave, On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 4:20 PM, david collins <antpuncher@gmail.com> wrote:
Dave, you're right, I misread. How much time can we get? I'm not sure what the limits are for the remaining types-of-meetings available. There are a few other venues we could explore in Austin, as well.
I had nixed it first, too, since I was looking for workshops. I'll email the contact person and see what the skinny is.
Sweet -- thanks for taking point on this.
I'm still personally mostly in favor of EC2, I think, because I believe it will be easier for people to integrate into their existing workflow -- sshing into EC2 is probably a bit less invasive than rebooting with a USB drive. I might be off-base though, and it would be less robust for network interruptions.
I think EC2 is definitely a useful idea. Can you have a setup where everyone gets their own accounts, but the environment is centrally visible? Also if one is allowed to run screen on ec2, then network interuuptions aren't _that_ big a deal...
The idea here -- and Stephen or someone else can chime in as I think he's dealt with this in the past -- is that you have the machine image (the AMI) and to that you attach existing volumes. So we'd set up a single AMI with the yt, which we'd boot and hand out credentials for. At this point, the AMI has "forked" and each person has diverged. The AMI is where we'd put yt. The existing volumes would have things like datasets and so on, and so people would be able to keep their environment going and modify their datasets. Things are ephemeral on the AMIs, though, so as soon as the machine spins down all local modifications and scripts and whatnot would get lost. So good time to talk about version control, the hub, etc, I suppose! We could probably simply keep them running the entire duration of the workshop.
Would it be possible to have just the yt stack installed on a thumb drive, and not a whole linux distro, so users mount the drive then do something like "source /thumbdrive/ytsetup" to set up their environment? I'm not familiar enough with the dependencies of yt. I agree that a full reboot is a hassle, esp. for those of using osx (unless that's something that can be done...)
It's possible, yes, but tricky. My guess is that it might pose more problems because of minor incompatibilities than it would solve, compared to each individual running the install_script.sh... -Matt
I think the idea is to have them pre-prepared to save time and to boot onto, in case of network issues. I don't know how we would integrate that with mirroring onto personal USBs.
-Matt
From G.S.
On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 12:38 PM, Brian O'Shea <bwoshea@gmail.com> wrote:
This is a very good idea. Maybe we could try it with Amazon EC2? I have had success building an AMI in the past, and it's very easy to do... although not free, and not local. I do though like the idea of thumb drives... and I can't imagine it wouldn't be an interactive workshop!
That might be rad, if the network connection is reasonable-- If we had 50 users for an 8 hour meeting and can swing the cheap option, that's only $35. Show me 50 thumb drives for $35 and I'll show you 2 thumb drives and a pile of plastic. Also windows users could get on with putty, if there are any of those.
To pile onto this, if we choose to go that way I can get MSU to donate a big pile of thumb drives, though they will have some combination of MSU, ICER and Physics Department logos slapped onto them... :-)
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