CS 575 - Monitor CPU Usage
At SDSU, accounts issued to students in typical computer courses
are limited only by the amount of allowed file space.
When students run programs on the Cray, they will have a fixed
amount of CPU time to work with and monitoring a finite
resource such as this is a new skill to develop. To aid with this,
students are given a first programming project to run on a mainframe at
SDSU and introduce the concept of accounting using crude UNIX timing
tools (e.g., dtime). During the semester, students are reminded that they
must complete their course projects on the Cray without exceeding their CPU
allocations. The more sophisticated timing and resource monitoring tools
on the Cray can be used to ensure that the student projects do
not use up more time than they are allocated for the semester
(which is typically 5 to 10 minutes of Cray CPU time for each student).