Experiences getting coursework students working on the SCC

In the second half of 2011, I ran a Multicore Computing course (COMP8320) for advanced undergrads and postgrads.  For their 3rd assignment, they wrote some simple linear algebra algorithms and then did a fairly comprehensive performance analysis based on a largish number of experiments on the SCC.  The issue I had as instructor of course was a find a way that a dozen or so students could safely and fairly use the SCC at any time they wanted (especially in the last 2 days before their deadline!!) without someone having to be there to monitor and if needed reboot the machine.

Anyway,  it can be done!   A rather inelegant combination of scripts and lockfiles, and once I added a script that identified and purged any process on a core which looked like it was from a leftover job, it all went very well (no reboots for the last 3 days after that).  Of course, I did not tell them any other way of accessing the SCC other than the modified rccerun script that I provided. No doubt there are more elegant solutions but if anyone is interested in how to make the SCC a pseudo- multiuser machine or even in the reasonably interesting performance experiments that the students did on the SCC, I have written it up and made the relevant source files available, please see: the course web pages .

If anyone else has had experiences is  making the SCC available to coursework students, I'd be interested to hear.