15Mar2008BCCDNotes

From Education

15 Mar 2008

On the table is how to fossilize/publish content from a given workshop because:

• Common complaint is lack of access to resources
• Resources constantly changing, so it's difficult to have a working set of documents that jive with what was taught/learned

Thoughts:

• Fossilize how?
  • What format?
    • HTML?
    • wiki pull to uneditable wiki?
    • wiki to PDF?
      • Thought process led PDF.
  • Mechanics for instructors
    • Ready to publish, can push a button
    • Like Google Map extension, Edit link/button
• Moodle/Drupal/Wiki? Discussion mainly around Moodle.
  • Use wiki as a way of maintaining living course content
  • Wiki will have a "Publish Button"
    • Publish button adds headers/footers/copyright on PDF
    • Ask for workshop name/date/place/etc.
  • Moodle
    • Very time oriented. Lends itself well to a publish button
    • Moodle will have link to "Published PDF" on wiki
    • Moodle has links to pre/during/after quizzes
    • Can Moodle roll-up quizzes from "8" different
      • want to see results of each quiz by course
      • want to see all quizzes by all courses

Noted that we provide technical infrastructure, analogous to SC.

• SC provides "pulling fiber" infrastucture
• We (SCEd) provides education content infrastructure.

Move to NFS Based BCCD Cluster

• pkbcast
  • who becomes server?
    • election does not work, race conditions etc.; instructor chooses
    • script, invokable at boot time, but also from commandline
• boot as client, or option to boot as server (default to client)
  • if client
    • at login, detect what communities available, give choice, or standalone
      • if no communities, work locally
      • utilize Paul's push/pull method to synchronize at the point a community later becomes available
    • no user logs in after TIMEOUT, pick one that *is accepting* random nodes
  • if server
    • either boot with previous saved instance (discussed later),
    • or make new setup, including community name ...
• as client is able to logout of one community and into another, the server is able to "exile a client to a different island"
• upon running an MPI (LAM/MPICH/OpenMP/OpenMPI)
  • use an mpirun wrapper script
    • must santize mpi host file to make sure that all requested hosts are still up and accepting connections
• after a day of work, need to be able to save user logins, passwords, data, etc. Server script