sjb@ai.toronto.edu (Stephen Bellantoni) (02/10/89)
Some of the theory group professors are getting a little concerned about unneccessary charges which are being incurred on the csri system. Theory students should NOT have any files on the csri system. Keep your files on neat.ai. You can expect your csri files to be moved over to neat.ai without further warning, if you do not move them over yourself. Theory students should NOT use the laserwriters (-Plw) to print files. Use the imagen (prtex or ipr commands on neat.ai). It is ok to use the theory suns to rlogin to neat.ai, but you should "nice" these sessions. The way to do this is to put "/bin/nice -20 rx ; logout" in your login file. Your window manager should run on neat, too. Do NOT use suntools. Suntools uses cpu on the local (csri) machine, is not as easy to use for remote sessions, and furthermore the individual tools do not always run nice even when the initial "suntools" command was niced. Stephen (at behest of Al Borodin)
me@csri.toronto.edu (Daniel Simon) (02/11/89)
In article <89Feb10.153311est.38064@neat.ai.toronto.edu> sjb@ai.toronto.edu (Stephen Bellantoni) writes: > >Some of the theory group professors are getting a little concerned about >unneccessary charges which are being incurred on the csri system. > >Stephen (at behest of Al Borodin) By far the greatest portion (over 60% in my supervisor's group) of the charges incurred by theory students is the $0.80/hr. set charge instituted last December for console time on a CSRI sun. A solution would be to provide theory students with access to theory SUNs. At present, theory students have no choice but to work on CSRI SUNs (even if only as terminals attached to neat.ai) and pay the heavy cost. I am given to understand that the AI group has decided to bite the bullet and accept the higher costs as still cheaper than buying more AI SUNs. Whatever the theory group decides, we should all be aware that legitimate SUN use has simply become more expensive than it used to be. Dan (at the behest of Dan, Mark and Jim)
sjb@ai.toronto.edu (Stephen Bellantoni) (02/13/89)
me@csri.toronto.edu (Daniel Simon) writes: >By far the greatest portion (over 60% in my supervisor's group) of the charges >incurred by theory students is the $0.80/hr. set charge instituted last >December for console time on a CSRI sun. A solution would be to provide theory >students with access to theory SUNs. At present, theory students have no >choice but to work on CSRI SUNs (even if only as terminals attached to >neat.ai) and pay the heavy cost. I just meant "unneccessary charges". That includes most disk usage, all lw usage, and most cpu usage. Clearly console usage is neccessary. Basically they're just asking that everybody nice EVERYTHING and keep their files on neat. Actually 60% console charges is pretty low, since in some groups where everybody uses the method I describe, console charges account for more than 80% of charges. Targets for the output of "charges" would be: cpu prime + night ............. under 0.50 hours/month cpu nice prime + nice night ... under 8.00 hours/month disk .......................... under 200 K/month lw ............................ zero Those figures for cpu are very high, considering that it is just I/O associated overhead. The non-niced 0.50 would account for HALF of the charges for the services listed! Most of the other half is the niced cpu. Keeping your files on csri incurs some disk usage but also causes higher cpu usage as you edit them, etc. If no-one else is using the machine when you log on, you can expect nice programs to run as fast as non-niced ones. Obviously if the imagen is broken and you really need something printed, you might as well print it on the csri lw's. >legitimate SUN use has simply become more expensive than it used to be. Well, overall, csri seems to be adjusting rates to keep taking in the amount it needs to maintain operating costs, as it has always done. The ANT group has started incurring costs twice, once for the overhead for neat.ai et al, and once for continued csri usage. One solution to this would be for ANT to buy some of the csri suns, and I think this is being considered. Sorry for being so long-winded.