We just wrapped up 4th and final day of SlicerMorph 101 short course. It was a big success. As someone who had done fair number of online short courses like this and do NOT like the online format, I should say this worked very well and was a big success. So here are some notes, if anyone is interested
This was the first real test of the MorphoCloud infrastructure we have been building. There were total of 28 attendees, and each attendee got their own private g3.xl instance on JetStream2 along with a persistent 100GB private storage volume. We also created a network share with the sample data preloaded, to which the attendees had R/O access.
What worked:
- No “I cannot find that folder/module/extension”
- Ease of direct access to the instances from backdoor for troubleshooting (though we mostly used the screen share so that everyone can benefit).
- Connections were pretty good (though everyone was from US and we advised them to use their university wired connections for best performance).
- Pretty much everything.
What didn’t work:
- While I thought I emphasized that they should launch their instances prior to the course, this was apparently not clear to about 50% attendees. It takes about 5-15 minutes to fully provision an instance from scratch and for the attendee to receive the email. So this needs to be done earlier.
- Learning to unshelve the instances took some time (first 1/2 day).
- Linux desktop experienc can be improved (probably need a few more shortcuts) etc…
- A driver conflict on the JS2 broke torch. So we werent able to run DL workflows. Funnily enough this had no affect on the 3D rendering performance. (We should be able to update this next week)
These are people had no prior cloud experience and except for a few they didn’t know anything about linux terminal and running things from command line. So the first few hours was a bit shaky, but rest of the days were smooth sailing, so much more than I have anticipated. This is backed up by their post-course survey input:
If you would like to see the instructions from the course it is:
I should emphasize the whole infrastructure done by @jcfr by repurposing parts of the JS2 Exosphere interface. To be perfectly honest, I was a bit skeptical on github based automation… But at this point I think it is working quite well, and I suspect we might even tweak a bit better. For those of you who are interested looking under the hood, and perhaps even using for your workshops, the whole workflow is available at GitHub - MorphoCloud/MorphoCloudWorkflow: Reusable GitHub Workflows to manage JetStream2 backed on-demand virtual machines