Sage Amazon AMI ?

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Dima Pasechnik

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Oct 27, 2012, 9:30:36 AM10/27/12
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I wonder if anyone tried building an Amazon EC2 AMI with Sage loaded.
EC2 service has a free tier, which is a bit smallish configuration, but perhaps
one can still fit Sage in?

Dima

William Stein

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Oct 27, 2012, 10:50:18 AM10/27/12
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I compiled Sage from source last year on their free EC2 of that time.
It took over a week, due to extremely limited RAM (and maybe slow hard
drives for swap). Using a non-free version is a lot better, as Jeff
Barr -- the Lead Web Services Evangelist at Amazon.com -- talks about
in this blog post entitled "Building Sage (Open Source Math) on Amazon
EC2":

http://www.jeff-barr.com/?p=1595

William

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Dima Pasechnik

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Oct 27, 2012, 12:50:53 PM10/27/12
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On 2012-10-27, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 27, 2012 at 6:30 AM, Dima Pasechnik <dim...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> I wonder if anyone tried building an Amazon EC2 AMI with Sage loaded.
>> EC2 service has a free tier, which is a bit smallish configuration,
>> but perhaps one can still fit Sage in?
>
> I compiled Sage from source last year on their free EC2 of that time.
> It took over a week, due to extremely limited RAM (and maybe slow hard
> drives for swap). Using a non-free version is a lot better, as Jeff
> Barr -- the Lead Web Services Evangelist at Amazon.com -- talks about
> in this blog post entitled "Building Sage (Open Source Math) on Amazon
> EC2":
>
> http://www.jeff-barr.com/?p=1595

Did you try getting Sage into "Amazon in Education" program, as suggested by
that blogpost?
They aren't saying what they offer. We might have potential uses of it
here, although our profile isn't so high...

>
> William
>
>>
>> Dima

William Stein

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Oct 27, 2012, 12:58:35 PM10/27/12
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On Sat, Oct 27, 2012 at 9:50 AM, Dima Pasechnik <dim...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2012-10-27, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, Oct 27, 2012 at 6:30 AM, Dima Pasechnik <dim...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>> I wonder if anyone tried building an Amazon EC2 AMI with Sage loaded.
>>> EC2 service has a free tier, which is a bit smallish configuration,
>>> but perhaps one can still fit Sage in?
>>
>> I compiled Sage from source last year on their free EC2 of that time.
>> It took over a week, due to extremely limited RAM (and maybe slow hard
>> drives for swap). Using a non-free version is a lot better, as Jeff
>> Barr -- the Lead Web Services Evangelist at Amazon.com -- talks about
>> in this blog post entitled "Building Sage (Open Source Math) on Amazon
>> EC2":
>>
>> http://www.jeff-barr.com/?p=1595
>
> Did you try getting Sage into "Amazon in Education" program, as suggested by
> that blogpost?

Not really. Several EC2 reps came by my office and talked with me
about Sage, math research, and https://salv.us, and encouraged me to
apply for that. But then they also told me they would just give me
free credits for my EC2 account right off, so I didn't apply. I
responded to their email offering me free credits, and they never
responded back to me. I had messed up and waited about two months
before responding to their email, so maybe the person I had written to
had quit in the meantime; I don't know.

One thing -- when I built sage on an EC2 free instance, I left it on
for a while, and noticed that I *did* get billed for bandwidth. So
watch out.

> They aren't saying what they offer. We might have potential uses of it
> here, although our profile isn't so high...

If you want to put together an application with me, I'm interested.

William

Dima Pasechnik

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Oct 27, 2012, 2:03:19 PM10/27/12
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Yes, sure, it would be great, although it does not look as if they
really expect collaborative applications.
Their application form asks for Name+University+Country of the
applicant. I certainly can mention in the form that it's a
collaboration with UW, but this does not sound very convincing.
UW looks much better positioned to get such a grant as the main
site of Sage development.
I'd be happy to help with the proposal (and as a "junior partner").

We certainly see a huge need in a well-functioning resource like
sagenb.org, or an equivalent, e.g. for (educational) math
projects with high schools, which does not sit behind the
(quite considerable) university red tape.
Or, perhaps, smaller scale resources of this sort, which are
easily deployable (something akin to iPython's
https://notebookcloud.appspot.com/)

Or perhaps it should be a bigger, multi-national, proposal,
like the GSoC one?
(BTW, GSoC participation might sound like a very good
credential to them, IMHO)

Dima



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> William

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