4 ms·

I had a similar situation happen at my alma mater; we had a set of interactive login farms available (one sit-down computer cluster designed for interactive des

by jwise0 13y ago

I had a similar situation happen at my alma mater; we had a set of interactive login farms available (one sit-down computer cluster designed for interactive desktop use, and one shell cluster designed for remote login). Periodically, users would run around using up all of the farm resources they could find to go mine cryptocurrencies, to the extent that they would starve people working on real class work. The all-time worst were the GPU miners, which caused substantial desktop latency, since they threaded poorly with whatever the compositing window manager du jour was. Sigh. Glad this guy got nailed. This kind of thing can be pretty disruptive. I think most of us did stupid things in our time at college, but I'm surprised that this guy has the temerity to go try to brag about it on Hacker News with his real identity...

Jtsummers 13y ago
At GATech in the 90s/early 00s (can't speak to today) they used a unit of computational resource on the remote login systems called "bananas". You had a finite number of them. Staying logged in 24x7 throughout the semester but doing nothing else, you'd essentially use 0. Printing off something (they had, again can't speak to the present situation, a great printing service) might use up 0.01 bananas as a measure of the CPU time it took to submit the job. The effect was to mete out the limited computational resources. This wasn't 100% effective, but greatly discouraged abuse of the system (you had to go before the admins to ask for extra bananas). The main way to bypass it: bananas weren't deducted until the job completed. If you had a long-running task, or a program caught in an infinite loop, you could leave it running indefinitely and take the hit at the end of the term or just postpone the hit until it was more convenient for you to go ask for forgiveness. EDIT: And a note, this was not established on every computer system on campus. Just one of the more commonly used non-major systems.

by jwise0 13y ago

Jtsummers 13y ago

At GATech in the 90s/early 00s (can't speak to today) they used a unit of computational resource on the remote login systems called "bananas". You had a finite number of them. Staying logged in 24x7 throughout the semester but doing nothing else, you'd essentially use 0. Printing off something (they had, again can't speak to the present situation, a great printing service) might use up 0.01 bananas as a measure of the CPU time it took to submit the job. The effect was to mete out the limited computational resources. This wasn't 100% effective, but greatly discouraged abuse of the system (you had to go before the admins to ask for extra bananas). The main way to bypass it: bananas weren't deducted until the job completed. If you had a long-running task, or a program caught in an infinite loop, you could leave it running indefinitely and take the hit at the end of the term or just postpone the hit until it was more convenient for you to go ask for forgiveness. EDIT: And a note, this was not established on every computer system on campus. Just one of the more commonly used non-major systems.