[Yt-dev] Interest in a yt Workshop?

[Matthew Turk]

Hi Dave,

On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 4:20 PM, david collins <antpuncher at 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 at 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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>
>
>
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