Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 10:59:46 -0500 From: Kelly Hendrix <kelly@compuage.com> To: Chris Fuhrman <cfuhrman@tfcci.com> Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Now a little OT but RE: FreeBSD and Linux (More Questions!) Message-ID: <20010316105946.B1313@hnet04.kellyhendrix.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.30.0103160812040.10185-100000@icestorm.tfcc.com>; from cfuhrman@tfcci.com on Fri, Mar 16, 2001 at 08:23:14AM -0500 References: <15024.21186.135020.488657@guru.mired.org> <Pine.LNX.4.30.0103160812040.10185-100000@icestorm.tfcc.com>
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> This reminds me of an old story told by my Simulations professor. Back in > the department-x-gets-y-cpu-cycles days, they would run Simulations in > FORTRAN since that was the only language available to do that sort of > thing (there might have been others but they used FORTRAN for whatever > reason). The budgeting was set up such that if you only used 80% of your > alloted CPU time on the University system, then you were only alloted that > much CPU time the following fiscal year. > > Since the department (Management Science? Statistics? Don't know...) > didn't want to loose their CPU budget allotment, they came up with the > following means of using up their surplus CPU time at the end of the > fiscal year: > > I = 1 > DO WHILE (1 .EQ. 1) > I = I + 1 > END DO > At the university I attended, all CS students were given an account with a limited number of cpu seconds (don't ask how many because frankly, I don't remember). To keep runaway programs from eating all of a student's time, depending on what level computer course he was taking, limits were placed on the amount that a single program run could use. A friend of mine knew of a hack that took off this limit, and with a personal account, he executed a program similar to the one above. For whatever reasons, whether the account exceeded it's own time limits and started munching other peoples cpu time, or the program started using progressively more and more memory (as I recall he may of used a dynamically created linked list to expedite things) he crashed the computer he was on. Actually, I think they just had to turn it off. Anyway, it happened to be the main computer in the system (some sort of PDP-11 i think) and his little program ended up taking out the whole system for 3-4 days. Except for, of course, the Unix system running on it's own set of PDP-11's in the EE dept. Not that this adds much to the thread at hand, just remembering the 'good ole days' Kelly Hendrix PS I don't miss punch cards :) -- ______________________________________________________________________ | There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a | | miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. | | | | Albert Einstein (1879-1955) | |______________________________________________________________________| To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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