Re: [seul-edu] How big a server?

["Prevett, Larry" <Prevettl@cochise.cc.az.us>]

We're doing things on a smaller scale here, 20-30
users, with machines ranging from 133Mhz
with 32 MB ram, 400 Mhz with 128 MB ram,  
and a couple of faster 1Ghz Athlons with
512 MB Ram, one of which is running WIMS.
We have had some positive experience with   
console apps to produce graphic files which 
can be viewed from a web browser on slow     
machines with not much ram. .

Students ssh to their account on the server
from either a Windows or Linux machine.
They run labs that use console apps like
gnuplot, maxima, octave, bc, pari-gp,
or povray, etc. The text or graphic output
files are rolled up into a structured web
document inside their personal web space
using latex2html. The extra advantage to   
latex2html is that the students can generate
a kind of electronic portfolio of their work
over the semester. Latex/latex2html handles
the graphics and scientific/math notation
nicely. Students can also paste some WIMS
calculators into their web pages if they
want to.

I put some examples of a Maxima/latex2html
lab in the wiki:

http://www.seul.org:8080/wiki/edu/Maxima%20and%20Latex2html

I've had as many as 10 students using these
applications simultaneously on a 233Mhz  
Pentium with 96 Mb of ram. I suspect that
no more than 5Mb of ram was required for
each user.

We haven't used molecular modeling software 
yet, but we have plans to do so. Some        
molecular modeling software can output pov
files which can be rendered with povray.
So for intensive computations we want to
render the pov files in a cluster environment
with pvmpov (requires PVM). We also have plans
to experiment with povchem, Mosix and MPI
but haven't got that far with it yet.

Anyway, whatever you decide to use for 
machines and software, I guess I'd
recommend implementing some labs involving
console apps which are very appropriate   
for math/sci environments and go easier  
on the bandwidth.

L. Prevett
Mathematics Instructor
Cochise College, Sierra Vista, AZ, US
prevettl@cochise.cc.az.us