As a Campus Champion, I might be asked which service provider is most appropriate for my task.
I wonder if anyone has a sort of ‘flow chart’ that may help someone choose, or information on how to determine that.
So I thought of some questions, just starting with the easiest to deal with ‘case scenario’: take a script that currently runs on a personal machine and port it to ACCESS resources.
For each service provider with an interactive portal, for a user to run:
- an R code, in Rstudio
- a Python code, in a Jupyter notebook
- a MATLAB code, in the GUI
Compare ease of use, and record the following: Did they need to request a MATLAB license? How did they install R and Python libraries? From where were they supposed to read and save files? Is that space purged? Can you use Globus to transfer the files to/from wherever that is? Can you access the internet during the interactive session? Did they have to wait for a job to start, or will it always be immediately available?
Then, the next level:
- RStudio: Will the session be terminated if they use too much memory?
- Python: Which providers enable you to run that Jupyter Notebook from a GPU? Which providers have [these types] of GPUs, and which is the latest NVIDIA driver installed?
- MATLAB: read in a big file and make a 3D plot, when you rotate it, is it super slow and annoying?