Professor C: Uh , is it the twenty - fourth ?
PhD F: now we 're on .
Professor C: Yeah .
PhD A: Uh Chuck , is the mike type wireless PhD F: Yes .
PhD A: wireless headset ? OK .
PhD F: Yes .
Professor C: Yeah .
PhD F: For you it is .
Professor C: Yeah . We uh we abandoned the lapel because they sort of were not too not too hot , not too cold , they were you know , they were uh , far enough away that you got more background noise , uh , and uh and so forth
PhD A: Uh - huh .
Professor C: but they weren't so close that they got quite the you know , the really good No , th
PhD A: OK .
Professor C: they I mean they didn't Wait a minute . I 'm saying that wrong . They were not so far away that they were really good representative distant mikes ,
PhD A: Uh - huh .
Professor C: but on the other hand they were not so close that they got rid of all the interference . So it was no didn't seem to be a good point to them . On the other hand if you only had to have one mike in some ways you could argue the lapel was a good choice , precisely because it 's in the middle .
PhD A: Yeah , yeah .
Professor C: There 's uh , some kinds of junk that you get with these things that you don't get with the lapel uh , little mouth clicks and breaths and so forth are worse with these than with the lapel , but given the choice we there seemed to be very strong opinions for uh , getting rid of lapels .
PhD A: The mike number is Professor C: So ,
PhD F: Uh , your mike number 's written on the back of that unit there .
PhD A: Oh yeah . One .
PhD F: And then the channel number 's usually one less than that .
PhD A: Oh , OK . OK .
PhD F: It - it 's one less than what 's written on the back of your PhD A: OK . OK .
PhD F: yeah . So you should be zero , actually .
PhD A: Hello ? Yeah .
PhD F: For your uh , channel number .
PhD A: Yep , yep .
Professor C: And you should do a lot of talking so we get a lot more of your pronunciations . no , they don't don't have a have any Indian pronunciations .
PhD F: So what we usually do is um , we typically will have our meetings
Professor C: Yeah .
PhD F: and then at the end of the meetings we 'll read the digits . Everybody goes around and reads the digits on the the bottom of their forms .
Professor C: Session R
PhD D: R - nineteen ?
PhD A: OK .
Professor C: R - nineteen .
PhD F: Yeah . We 're This is session R - nineteen .
Professor C: If you say so . O K . Do we have anything like an agenda ? What 's going on ? Um . I guess um . So . One thing PhD F: Sunil 's here for the summer ?
Professor C: Sunil 's here for the summer , right . Um , so , one thing is to talk about a kick off meeting maybe uh , and then just uh , I guess uh , progress reports individually , and then uh , plans for where we go between now and then , pretty much . Um .
PhD F: I could say a few words about um , some of the uh , compute stuff that 's happening around here , so that people in the group know .
Professor C: Mm - hmm . OK . Why don't you start with that ? That 's sort of PhD F: OK .
Professor C: Yeah ?
PhD F: We um So we just put in an order for about twelve new machines , uh , to use as sort of a compute farm . And um , uh , we ordered uh , SUN - Blade - one - hundreds , and um , I 'm not sure exactly how long it 'll take for those to come in , but , uh , in addition , we 're running So the plan for using these is , uh , we 're running P - make and Customs here and Andreas has sort of gotten that all uh , fixed up and up to speed . And he 's got a number of little utilities that make it very easy to um , run things using P - make and Customs . You don't actually have to write P - make scripts and things like that . The simplest thing And I can send an email around or , maybe I should do an FAQ on the web site about it or something . Um ,
Professor C: How about an email that points to the FAQ ,
PhD F: there 's a c
Professor C: you know what I 'm saying ?
PhD F: Yeah , yeah .
Professor C: so that you can Yeah .
PhD F: Uh , there 's a command , uh , that you can use called " run command " . " Run dash command " , " run hyphen command " . And , if you say that and then some job that you want to execute , uh , it will find the fastest currently available machine , and export your job to that machine , and uh and run it there and it 'll duplicate your environment . So you can try this as a simple test with uh , the L S command . So you can say " run dash command L S " , and , um , it 'll actually export that LS command to some machine in the institute , and um , do an LS on your current directory . So , substitute LS for whatever command you want to run , and um And that 's a simple way to get started using using this . And , so , soon , when we get all the new machines up , um , e then we 'll have lots more compute to use . Now th one of the nice things is that uh , each machine that 's part of the P - make and Customs network has attributes associated with it . Uh , attributes like how much memory the machine has , what its speed is , what its operating system , and when you use something like " run command " , you can specify those attributes for your program . For example if you only want your thing to run under Linux , you can give it the Linux attribute , and then it will find the fastest available Linux machine and run it on that . So . You can control where your jobs go , to a certain extent , all the way down to an individual machine . Each machine has an attribute which is the name of itself . So you can give that as an attribute and it 'll only run on that . If there 's already a job running , on some machine that you 're trying to select , your job will get queued up , and then when that resource , that machine becomes available , your job will get exported there . So , there 's a lot of nice features to it and it kinda helps to balance the load of the machines and uh , right now Andreas and I have been the main ones using it and we 're Uh . The SRI recognizer has all this P - make customs stuff built into it .
Professor C: So as I understand , you know , he 's using all the machines and you 're using all the machines ,
PhD F: So .
Professor C: is the rough division of PhD F: Yeah . Exactly . Yeah , you know , I I sort of got started {comment} using the recognizer just recently and uh , uh I fired off a training job , and then I fired off a recognition job and I get this email about midnight from Andreas saying , " uh , are you running two trainings simultaneously s my m my jobs are not getting run . " So I had to back off a little bit . But , soon as we get some more machines then uh then we 'll have more compute available . So , um , that 's just a quick update about what we 've got . So .
Grad G: Um , I have I have a question about the uh , parallelization ?
PhD F: Mm - hmm .
Grad G: So , um , let 's say I have like , a thousand little little jobs to do ?
PhD F: Mm - hmm .
Grad G: Um , how do I do it with " run command " ? I mean do PhD F: You could write a script uh , which called run command on each sub - job
Grad G: Uh - huh . A thousand times ?
PhD F: right ? But you probably wanna be careful with that
Grad G: OK .
PhD F: because um , you don't wanna saturate the network . Uh , so , um , you know , you should you should probably not run more than , say ten jobs yourself at any one time , uh , just because then it would keep other people Grad G: Oh , too much file transfer and stuff .
PhD F: Well it 's not that so much as that , you know , e with if everybody ran fifty jobs at once then it would just bring everything to a halt and , you know , people 's jobs would get delayed , so it 's sort of a sharing thing . Um ,
Grad G: OK .
PhD F: so you should try to limit it to somet sometim some number around ten jobs at a time . Um . So if you had a script for example that had a thousand things it needed to run , um , you 'd somehow need to put some logic in there if you were gonna use " run command " , uh , to only have ten of those going at a time . And uh , then , when one of those finished you 'd fire off another one . Um ,
Professor C: I remember I I forget whether it was when the Rutgers or or Hopkins workshop , I remember one of the workshops I was at there were everybody was real excited cuz they got twenty - five machines and there was some kind of P - make like thing that sit sent things out .
PhD F: Mm - hmm . Mm - hmm .
Professor C: So all twenty - five people were sending things to all twenty - five machines
PhD F: Mm - hmm . Yeah .
Professor C: and and things were a lot less efficient than if you 'd just use your own machine .
PhD F: Yeah . Yep . Yeah , exactly . Yeah , you have to be a little bit careful .
Professor C: as I recall , but . Yeah .
PhD D: Hmm .
PhD F: Um , but uh , you can also If you have that level of parallelization um , and you don't wanna have to worry about writing the logic in in a Perl script to take care of that , you can use um , P - make
Grad G: Just do P - make .
PhD F: and and you basically write a Make file that uh , you know your final job depends on these one thousand things ,
Grad G: s Mm - hmm .
PhD F: and when you run P - make , uh , on your Make file , you can give it the dash capital J and and then a number ,
Grad G: Mm - hmm .
PhD F: and that number represents how many uh , machines to use at once . And then it 'll make sure that it never goes above that .
Grad G: Right .
PhD F: So ,
Grad G: Right . OK .
PhD F: I can get some documentation .
PhD D: So it it 's it 's not systematically queued . I mean all the jobs are running . If you launch twenty jobs , they are all running . Alright .
PhD F: It depends . If you " Run command " , that I mentioned before , is doesn't know about other things that you might be running .
PhD D: Uh - huh .
PhD F: So , it would be possible to run a hundred run jobs at once ,
PhD D: Right .
PhD F: and they wouldn't know about each other . But if you use P - make , then , it knows about all the jobs that it has to run
PhD D: Mm - hmm .
PhD F: and it can control , uh , how many it runs simultaneously .
Professor C: So " run command " doesn't use P - make , or ?
PhD F: It uses " export " underlyingly . But , if you i It 's meant to be run one job at a time ? So you could fire off a thousand of those , and it doesn't know any one of those doesn't know about the other ones that are running .
Professor C: So why would one use that rather than P - make ?
PhD F: Well , if you have , um Like , for example , uh if you didn't wanna write a P - make script and you just had a , uh an HTK training job that you know is gonna take uh , six hours to run , and somebody 's using , uh , the machine you typically use , you can say " run command " and your HTK thing and it 'll find another machine , the fastest currently available machine and and run your job there .
Professor C: Now , does it have the same sort of behavior as P - make , which is that , you know , if you run something on somebody 's machine and they come in and hit a key then it PhD F: Yes . Yeah , there are um Right . So some of the machines at the institute , um , have this attribute called " no evict " . And if you specify that , in in one of your attribute lines , then it 'll go to a machine which your job won't be evicted from .
Professor C: Mm - hmm .
PhD F: But , the machines that don't have that attribute , if a job gets fired up on that , which could be somebody 's desktop machine , and and they were at lunch ,
Professor C: Mm - hmm .
PhD F: they come back from lunch and they start typing on the console , then your machine will get evicted your job {comment} will get evicted from their machine and be restarted on another machine . Automatically . So which can cause you to lose time , right ? If you had a two hour job , and it got halfway through and then somebody came back to their machine and it got evicted . So . If you don't want your job to run on a machine where it could be evicted , then you give it the minus the attribute , you know , " no evict " , and it 'll pick a machine that it can't be evicted from . So .
Professor C: Um , what what about I remember always used to be an issue , maybe it 's not anymore , that if you if something required if your machine required somebody hitting a key in order to evict things that are on it so you could work , but if you were logged into it from home ?
PhD F: Mm - hmm .
Professor C: and you weren't hitting any keys ? cuz you were , home ?
PhD F: Yeah , I I 'm not sure how that works .
Professor C: Yeah .
PhD F: Uh , it seems like Andreas did something for that .
Professor C: Hmm .
PhD F: Um .
Professor C: OK . We can ask him sometime .
PhD F: But Yeah . I don't know whether it monitors the keyboard or actually looks at the console TTY , so maybe if you echoed something to the you know , dev dev console or something .
Professor C: You probably wouldn't ordinarily , though . Yeah . Right ? You probably wouldn't ordinarily .
PhD F: Hmm ?
Professor C: I mean you sort of you 're at home and you 're trying to log in , and it takes forever to even log you in , and you probably go , " screw this " ,
PhD F: Yeah , yeah .
Professor C: and  You know .
PhD F: Yeah . Yeah , so , um ,
Professor C: Yeah .
PhD F: yeah . I I can I 'm not sure about that one .
Professor C: yeah .
PhD F: But uh .
Professor C: OK .
PhD A: Uh , I need a little orientation about this environment and uh scr s how to run some jobs here because I never d did anything so far with this X emissions
PhD F: OK .
PhD A: So , I think maybe I 'll ask you after the meeting .
PhD F: Um . Yeah . Yeah , and and also uh , Stephane 's a a really good resource for that if you can't find me .
PhD A: Yeah , yeah , yeah . Yep . OK , sure
PhD D: Mmm .
PhD F: Especially with regard to the Aurora stuff .
PhD A: OK .
PhD F: He he knows that stuff better than I do .
Professor C: OK . Well , why don't we uh , uh , Sunil since you 're haven't haven't been at one of these yet , why don't yo you tell us what 's what 's up with you ? Wh - what you 've been up to , hopefully .