hosting the sage cell server

[William Stein]

Hi Sage Developers,

Is there anybody who would be willing to host the Sage cell server?
http://sagecell.sagemath.org/

This would take a dedicated machine or VM with at least 32GB RAM and
at least 100GB fast hard drives.

-- William

--
William (http://wstein.org)

[William Stein]

On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 2:50 PM, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Sage Developers,
>
> Is there anybody who would be willing to host the Sage cell server?
> http://sagecell.sagemath.org/
>
> This would take a dedicated machine or VM with at least 32GB RAM and
> at least 100GB fast hard drives.

This requires absolutely no maintenance apart from making sure that
the machine is functional and trusting Andrey Novoseltsev with admin
access.

[Sung-Jin Kim]

Hi William,

It is interesting to host a Sage cell server. 

I have a simple question. Is it only one or one of severals?

James Kim

CCB, Harvard

sungj...@fas.harvard.edu 

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Best regards,

(James) Sungjin Kim, Ph.D.

- Visiting Scholar in Harvard Chem. Depart, Cambridge, MA 02138

- SAIT, Samsung. Electronics Co., LTD

[William Stein]

On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 8:12 PM, Sung-Jin Kim
<jamessun...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi William,
>
> It is interesting to host a Sage cell server.
> I have a simple question. Is it only one or one of severals?

It is one:

http://sagecell.sagemath.org/

1) Somebody provides Andrew N. access to a sufficiently powerful computer or VM

2) He sets up the sage cell server software on that machine.

3) I point DNS for sagecell.sagemath.org at the machine so that it
starts serving requests.

4) Stop the existing VM.

William (http://wstein.org)

[kcrisman]

 

we offer two machines located in our data center (Opteron 270 with 16GB RAM and .5TB HDD each) to host the Sage cell server.

Bye from Frankfurt/Germany,

Sven

Danke!

William, Andrey - habt ihr das gesehen?  I mean, did you see this offer? 

[Andrey Novoseltsev]

Yes, I've sent a request for details to Sven.

For two months there will be (in a week, I hope) also a GCE instance
running, we'll see what happens after that.

Andrey

[Sven Köppel]

Hallo Karl-Dieter,

maybe I forgot to tell some details about the offer. I just sent Andrey an email containing some technical stuff (hosting and login details), but I would like to send some lines to the mailing lists considering our institute.

Namely, I am a theoretical physicist at Goethe University, Frankfurt. I maintain a positive relationship to the federal center for scientific computing, and we plan to host SAGE on a bigger scale. For us, self-hosting (in terms of a self-hosted cloud service) means independency of GCE et al. Anyway, after working on SAGE for two years with 4 students, I got the feeling computing power is clearly less a problem than having the manpower.

Actually I never realized you speak german, Karl-Dieter :-D  Do you know if there is any other SAGE community in Germany?

Bye for now,

Sven

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[pang]

Sorry for the late reply, but after some talks, the department of mathematics of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid can offer a core i3, with a 256GB SSD and 30GB of RAM.

[Andrey Novoseltsev]

On Thursday, 21 May 2015 03:15:22 UTC-6, pang wrote:

Sorry for the late reply, but after some talks, the department of mathematics of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid can offer a core i3, with a 256GB SSD and 30GB of RAM.

Great! The more servers we have the better for the load we can handle and overal resilence in case of hardware or legal issues.

If anyone in North America can provide a server instead of GCE that also would be fantastic. The current setup on GCE will cost about $1000/year after my trial is over and at the moment can't handle graceful updates as I've discovered yesterday. Tweaking configuration and fixing some bugs may improve the situation and I certainly will try to do it, but the fastest solution is to have a serer with more RAM.

Andrey

[William Stein]

On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 4:50 PM, Andrey Novoseltsev <novo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thursday, 21 May 2015 03:15:22 UTC-6, pang wrote:
>>
>> Sorry for the late reply, but after some talks, the department of
>> mathematics of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid can offer a core i3, with
>> a 256GB SSD and 30GB of RAM.
>
>
> Great! The more servers we have the better for the load we can handle and
> overal resilence in case of hardware or legal issues.
>
> If anyone in North America can provide a server instead of GCE that also
> would be fantastic. The current setup on GCE will cost about $1000/year

Andrey, did you hear about the new "pre-emptible" pricing that came
out two days ago? You get VM's that are exactly like normal, except
(1) they get randomly -- but safe -- shut down, and (2) they cost
about 70% less. That's a massive discount, and given the nature of
the cell server a random shut down is probably fine. I just wanted
to point this out...

> after my trial is over and at the moment can't handle graceful updates as
> I've discovered yesterday. Tweaking configuration and fixing some bugs may
> improve the situation and I certainly will try to do it, but the fastest
> solution is to have a serer with more RAM.
>
> Andrey

--
William (http://wstein.org)

[Dr. David Kirkby (Kirkby Microwave Ltd)]

On 14 Apr 2015 22:50, "William Stein" <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Sage Developers,
>
> Is there anybody who would be willing to host the Sage cell server?
> http://sagecell.sagemath.org/

I'm unable to do this, but I rather suspect that you would have zero or very few offers if the cloud software was closed source,  as you originally wanted to keep it. I expect it is a lot easier for someone to get permission from their institution to host open source software than it would be if it was closed source.

Dave.

[Rob Beezer]

The Sage Cell is a distinct project from Sage Math Cloud.  It has been open source since from inception.

Try the link in the message you quoted - it is a simple but powerful idea.

[William Stein]

On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 8:15 PM, Dr. David Kirkby (Kirkby Microwave
Ltd) <drki...@kirkbymicrowave.co.uk> wrote:
>
> On 14 Apr 2015 22:50, "William Stein" <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Sage Developers,
>>
>> Is there anybody who would be willing to host the Sage cell server?
>> http://sagecell.sagemath.org/
>
> I'm unable to do this, but I rather suspect that you would have zero or very
> few offers if the cloud software was closed source,

As Rob pointed out, SageCell server was never closed source.
SageCell server was an idea that Jason Grout and I came up with at a
Sage Days a couple years ago, since we wanted to implement something
very simple to test out some ideas involving scalability, robustness,
etc., and all the attempts in a few days to redo sagenb.org properly
(e.g., using a database, scalable, etc.) were mired in complexity.
Jason Grout then took the ball and ran with it.

I think the license of SageCell has always been BSD.

> as you originally wanted to keep it.

For the record, I personally do not like closed source and never
"wanted" SageMathCloud to be closed. It was closed for two "dark
years" because I was explicitly required to keep it closed by the
university's commercialization office...

> I expect it is a lot easier for someone to get permission
> from their institution to host open source software than it would be if it
> was closed source.

I totally agree.

Open source is better than closed source in sooooo many ways!

I really love open source. Open source was by far the number one
motivation for starting Sage.

>
> Dave.

>
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[mmarco]

I think i could get a VM inside a quad corte xeon in universidad de Zaragoza. Although they have a policy about only hosting services in the same domain name. I guess it wouldn't be a big problem to be cakes called sagecell.unizar.es

[Andrey Novoseltsev]

On Thursday, 21 May 2015 19:54:52 UTC-6, William wrote:

On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 4:50 PM, Andrey Novoseltsev <novo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> If anyone in North America can provide a server instead of GCE that also
> would be fantastic. The current setup on GCE will cost about $1000/year

Andrey, did you hear about the new "pre-emptible" pricing that came
out two days ago?  You get VM's that are exactly like normal, except
(1) they get randomly -- but safe -- shut down, and (2) they cost
about 70% less.  That's a massive discount, and given the nature of
the cell server a random shut down is probably fine.    I just wanted
to point this out...

Yes, I looked into it but I don't think it is a good option at the moment.

Random restarts were quite frustrating to me last spring since I often get interacts ready in the beginning of the class and then return to them from time to time. If they stop working in the middle, it wastes class time and I imagine many other instructors may get irritated as well. The situation last spring was that compute servers were restarted every 12-24 hours (automatically at random times - whenever things stopped working), so hitting a restart during class once a week was quite likely. I've managed to increase uptime to several weeks on old machines and intentional restarts for upgrades were mostly transparent to users. But there are still some bugs that lead to bigger memory usage than necessary and on 2core/13GB RAM GCE instance it does show - restarts are happening after a few days rather than weeks and last upgrade was quite opaque for 30 minutes or so.

Back to pre-emptible machines: assuming that random shutdowns are very rare, like once a month, it may be OK. But any random shutdown will be very visible to users or interacts/linked cells and every 24 hour migration will be visible because of the current IP-address sticking. Plus sometimes it may not be possible to create such instances at all, presumably during "busy times" when everybody is working actively including users of SageMathCell.

German servers on the other hand are running fine (they get about 1/3 of the load with current DNS setup) and if we can get another 2 in Spain, I would be in favour of just shutting down GCE for now. May affect latency from US, but that's how the rest of the world including Europe was living when all servers were in Seattle ;-)

Andrey

[Andrey Novoseltsev]

On Friday, 22 May 2015 10:16:12 UTC-6, mmarco wrote:

I think i could get a VM inside a quad corte xeon in universidad de Zaragoza. Although they have a policy about only hosting services in the same domain name. I guess it wouldn't be a big problem to be cakes called sagecell.unizar.es

So it would not be OK to have that name and in addition have sagecell.sagemath.org to resolve to it for some IPs?

The point of having a single and constant name is that old webpages with embedded cells work and old permalinks that point to a particular server with a particular database continue to resolve correctly. Running your own server under your own domain is certainly a great idea (you can have smaller load and full control on when upgrades happen, if at all), but it won't quite benefit the public servers and their users.

Andrey

[mmarco]

I will ask about it. Maybe i can convince the people in charge of that.

[Jason Grout]

On 5/22/15 01:02, William Stein wrote:
> I think the license of SageCell has always been BSD.

Like William and Rob said, the license has always been open source, and
the sage cell server has always been developed in the open. The license
of the source files is BSD, with the caveat that (to my understanding)
GPLv2+ is forced on us from importing Sage several places, as pointed
out in the license file
(https://github.com/sagemath/sagecell/blob/master/LICENSE.txt#L36):

"Some files (like interact_compatibility.py and interact_sagecell.py)
are licensed GPLv2+ for the sole reason that they import Sage GPLv2+
code (see the header for those files). If those imports are removed,
the files may be licensed with the modified BSD license."

"Since this package includes GPLv2+ code (namely those files above),
the repository as a whole is licensed GPLv2+."

Thanks,

Jason

[mmarco]

Ok,i talked to the vice-dean of the university, and it can be taken care of.

So the situation is the following:

They have a cluster that is not running because som problem with the power sources, they are woirking on solving it, so at some point it will be running.

They have agreed to setup some VM's there and allow Andrei, or whoever is in charge of the sagecell server to admin them

They have agreed to allow incoming connections to that machine with a domain name different than unizar.es provided there is a writen agreement with the responsible organization. I guess the sage foundation could play that role here.

Thoughts?

[William Stein]

On Thu, Jun 25, 2015 at 1:55 AM, mmarco <mma...@unizar.es> wrote:
> Ok,i talked to the vice-dean of the university, and it can be taken care of.
>
> So the situation is the following:
>
> They have a cluster that is not running because som problem with the power
> sources, they are woirking on solving it, so at some point it will be
> running.
> They have agreed to setup some VM's there and allow Andrei, or whoever is in
> charge of the sagecell server to admin them
> They have agreed to allow incoming connections to that machine with a domain
> name different than unizar.es provided there is a writen agreement with the
> responsible organization. I guess the sage foundation could play that role
> here.
> Thoughts?

The Sage Foundation is not a legal entity (it is just the name of an
account at Univ of Washington), so it can't play that role. Univ of
Washington obviously also can't be the responsible organization. It
seems like the written agreement should be between Andrei and them.

-- William

>
> El sábado, 23 de mayo de 2015, 11:03:06 (UTC+2), mmarco escribió:
>>
>> I will ask about it. Maybe i can convince the people in charge of that.
>>
>> El viernes, 22 de mayo de 2015, 20:49:22 (UTC+2), Andrey Novoseltsev
>> escribió:
>>>
>>> On Friday, 22 May 2015 10:16:12 UTC-6, mmarco wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I think i could get a VM inside a quad corte xeon in universidad de
>>>> Zaragoza. Although they have a policy about only hosting services in the
>>>> same domain name. I guess it wouldn't be a big problem to be cakes called
>>>> sagecell.unizar.es
>>>
>>>
>>> So it would not be OK to have that name and in addition have
>>> sagecell.sagemath.org to resolve to it for some IPs?
>>>
>>> The point of having a single and constant name is that old webpages with
>>> embedded cells work and old permalinks that point to a particular server
>>> with a particular database continue to resolve correctly. Running your own
>>> server under your own domain is certainly a great idea (you can have smaller
>>> load and full control on when upgrades happen, if at all), but it won't
>>> quite benefit the public servers and their users.
>>>
>>> Andrey
>

[kcrisman]

The Sage Foundation is not a legal entity (it is just the name of an
account at Univ of Washington), so it can't play that role.   Univ of

But perhaps there will be such a (non-UW) legal entity at some point in the near future?

[William Stein]

I've backed off on that for now, due to it being a large amount of
work (by me) to setup (and there being few people interested in
helping). I need to keep focused on SMC during the summer.

[mmarco]

Ok, it seems possible to host some instance of the cell server at the Universidad de Zaragoza (when we get the missing parts) if i sign as a responsible for it. Also, they asked me if itwould be possible to advertise the University as a collaborator.

So, what do you think, Andrey?

[Andrey Novoseltsev]

On Monday, 6 July 2015 08:36:33 UTC-6, mmarco wrote:

Ok, it seems possible to host some instance of the cell server at the Universidad de Zaragoza (when we get the missing parts) if i sign as a responsible for it. Also, they asked me if itwould be possible to advertise the University as a collaborator.

So, what do you think, Andrey?

I think that would be great, perhaps the root and help pages of public servers can list all current providers of servers with links? (I probably would just change the master repository accordingly - if someone wants to remove this list for local installations they are free to do it.)

Miguel, Sven, and Rafael - can you please let me know what "title" would you prefer for your organizations and where the link should go to?

William - GCE is not a provider as they are getting paid, should I list SageMath, Inc. linking to http://sagemath.com?

On a related note - it would be nice to have a backup admin for SageMathCell. At the moment I am the only one who knows exactly how things work (in terms of infrastructure, Jason is unquestionable expert on the actual code) and who can connect to every machine. William has access to GCE node and European servers have people who can access them as well, but it may be tricky/time consuming for them to figure out what to do if something goes wrong. Karl-Dieter tentatively volunteered, but has some reservations about admin skills. Is anyone else interested?

[William Stein]

On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 9:03 AM, Andrey Novoseltsev <novo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Monday, 6 July 2015 08:36:33 UTC-6, mmarco wrote:
>>
>> Ok, it seems possible to host some instance of the cell server at the
>> Universidad de Zaragoza (when we get the missing parts) if i sign as a
>> responsible for it. Also, they asked me if itwould be possible to advertise
>> the University as a collaborator.
>>
>> So, what do you think, Andrey?
>
>
> I think that would be great, perhaps the root and help pages of public
> servers can list all current providers of servers with links? (I probably
> would just change the master repository accordingly - if someone wants to
> remove this list for local installations they are free to do it.)
>
> Miguel, Sven, and Rafael - can you please let me know what "title" would you
> prefer for your organizations and where the link should go to?
>
> William - GCE is not a provider as they are getting paid, should I list
> SageMath, Inc. linking to http://sagemath.com?

Yes -- SageMath, Inc. is paying for the server, not google.

> On a related note - it would be nice to have a backup admin for
> SageMathCell. At the moment I am the only one who knows exactly how things
> work (in terms of infrastructure, Jason is unquestionable expert on the
> actual code) and who can connect to every machine. William has access to GCE
> node and European servers have people who can access them as well, but it
> may be tricky/time consuming for them to figure out what to do if something
> goes wrong. Karl-Dieter tentatively volunteered, but has some reservations
> about admin skills. Is anyone else interested?

--
William (http://wstein.org)