Hi Julia, (adding the computing list and Kenny to aid communications). Yes, this is something that has come from time to time since I have been involved in the computing committee. At one stage we almost bought a dedicated (small) set of servers for this purpose but then decided not to for some (good) reason that I cannot remember. Looking at the machines downstairs I can see that they are actually running condor (which makes them a useful resource). However I think that this is not enough by itself - obviously no documentation is a problem but there is more than that. I can see situations where access to considerables amount of data might be useful etc or to specific environments with specifically licensed software. I can see a number of ways of dealing with this (although they may require a modest outlay - hence Kenny's inclusion ;-) ). I think that the best approach might be to organise a meeting where we can decide this once and for and provide a good working environment. I will set up a doodle poll (although probably not until Monday). Adrian, perhaps you and could meet up earlier to discuss the options? Best, david On 13/02/15 14:39, Julia Sedgbeer wrote:
Hi Dave, Ray,
I'm emailing you in your capacity as members of the departmental computing ctte.
Tim has asked about computing facilities for projects (see email below). This comes up every year; some projects use research group facilities, some depend on students having their own laptops. Is there a way to make better use of the computing power of the teaching cluster for projects, e.g. a batch system (assuming that there currently isn't one) or similar?
Cheers, Julia
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2015 08:23:28 +0000 From: "Evans, Tim S" <t.evans@imperial.ac.uk> To: "Sedgbeer, Julia K" <j.sedgbeer@imperial.ac.uk> Subject: RE: MSci Proposals Dear Julia (cc'ing the departmental list to help communications),
Dear Julia,
Do you know if there is any specific dept/college support for student project computing needs? Or who to ask about this? Some of my Erasmus Bsc students may need some extra power. There was a system I made a note of but that doesn't seem to exist (see below).
Thanks
Tim
Old system:- Every year students ask about how they can use cluster computers for long running experiments/projects and we've been working to provide a solution to this. Condor is an open source package which is designed to queue up jobs and submit them to computers when they're not busy; it's been used on Linux by DoC for some time but we now have it available for Windows users. Any student who wants to run code which they've compiled or a .m file from Matlab can submit a job via Condor using the website https://icwincondor1.cc.ic.ac.uk/condor.A couple of key points are that the job must run non-interactively and must not try to access the user's H: drive (or any other specific location - the code should assume that all files are in the current directory)