Newsgroups: ut.theory
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!neat.ai.toronto.edu!sjb
From: sjb@ai.toronto.edu (Stephen Bellantoni)
Subject: Re: Charges
Message-ID: <89Feb13.144728est.38164@neat.ai.toronto.edu>
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
References: <89Feb10.153311est.38064@neat.ai.toronto.edu> <8902102354.AA23175@oconnor.csri.toronto.edu>
Date: Mon, 13 Feb 89 14:38:40 EST

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.

