Stack and Maxima on a Moodle Cluster

Stack and Maxima on a Moodle Cluster

by António Godinho -
Number of replies: 1

Hi,

I've a cluster of 5 webnodes with moodledata mounted via NFS.

Running CentOS 8, SELinux disabled (had to be donne..). All nodes are equal.

I've compiled from source sbcl-2.0.3 and maxima-5.42.2.

The healthcheck script runs without problems,and I can generate the optimized image without problems.


unix-optimised
OK CAS returned data as expected. You have a live connection to the CAS.
OK Correct and expected STACK-Maxima library version being used (2020042000).
Load optional Maxima libraries:
CAS results are being cached in the database.


Yet, sometimes I run into errors.

And I have things like this: CASText failed validation. CAS commands not valid. Forbidden function: plot3d. and contour_plot.

On Moodle I use the platform Linux(optimised) and maxima command: timeout --kill-after=10s 10s /moodledata/stack/maxima_opt_auto


This made me question a few things:

  • Since this is a cluster, should one image on each server wihout having one shared to all node on Moodle server?
  • Since it was compiled from source, should I use the platform Linux instead of the optimized version?
  • It's the maxima command correct?
  • Should I use older/other versions of sbcl and maxima?
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In reply to António Godinho

Re: Stack and Maxima on a Moodle Cluster

by Christopher Sangwin -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

Ok, well, STACK only supports a subset of the maxima comands, and plot3d. and contour_plot are not supported!  Is that your difficulty?

This is mentioned in the FAQ, e.g. here
https://stack2.maths.ed.ac.uk/demo2018/question/type/stack/doc/doc.php/Authoring/Author_FAQ.md

More information is here (aimed at developers)
https://stack2.maths.ed.ac.uk/demo2018/question/type/stack/doc/doc.php/Developer/Security_map.md

If you have different Maxima images on different nodes of your cluster then chaos will almost certainly arise sooner of later!