Projects

User projects run as pods. You can think of them as a container running a Linux environment with an unprivileged user inside. Each project has their own $HOME-directory on a shared filesystem. Their common user is called user and runs under UID 2001.

Overall, these project pods will use up most of the resources, because the services mentioned above scale with a much smaller factor in the number of users.

Their resource requests and limits are configured via quota settings (only admins can do that), or via “licenses” (see Licenses). This means there could be projects requesting a significant chunk of available CPU or memory resources.

For this CoCalc setup, the “request” is calculated from the limits via an over-commit ratio. This is set via the global site configuration settings, i.e. global.settings.default_quotas or that same filed in Admin → Site Settings. The parameter cpu_oc: 10 means the cpu over-commit ratio is 1:10 – which is fine for interactive use, because most of the time projects wait for user input. Similarly mem_oc: 5 means the memory over-commit ratio is 1:5.

Main challenges

  • You have to plan/adjust the size and number of nodes to match the overall requests for projects.

  • Users are sensitive to interrupted projects, because they can’t continue working and their intermediate state in e.g. notebooks is lost. Hence you can’t just willy-nilly delete projects.

  • Users are also sensitive to slow startup times. That’s why the Prepull service exists, pulling the large project images before marking the node ready for running these projects.

  • You can also partition the cluster heterogeneously, such that some projects run only on specific nodes, while all other projects end up in a common pool of project nodes.

Note

New since version 3.0.0: similar to Datastore, the software for the project server controlling each project, is mounted from a sidecar. This untangles the software users are running in a project from the required infrastructure necessary for CoCalc. In turn, this makes it easier to create customized software environments.