cobalt-general — A general discussion list for the BOSS system.

Re: [Cobalt-general] Hardware requirements of BOSS

[Russell B. <bo...@dc...>]

On Tue, 16 Aug 2005, Harri J=E4rvi wrote:

> what are in your experience the hardware requirements for a BOSS
> server running all three servers for a group of 100 to 200 students
> and set for about 10 autotests per submission? The server will contain
> the mysql server too.
>
> How much memory will be needed? How much processing power should be
> available? Would you suggest a multiprocessor system?

Until recently we used an Athlon 1GHz with 512MB RAM for all three=20
servers.  This performed well but would become noticeably slower close to=
=20
submission deadlines when students would using the autotests available to=
=20
them.  About a year ago, we upgraded to a dual Xeon setup with 2GB RAM.=20
This is more than adequate perhaps even overkill for our purposes but it=20
helps ensure that there's no chance we get swamped by last minute=20
submission rushes!

In short, a fast CPU (> 2GHz) and plenty of RAM (> 1GB) and you really=20
can't go wrong.  If you've got a slower system that should be fine too=20
but, if this is the case, you might want to look at separating the testin=
g=20
server to a another machine is really do lots of automatic tests.
  Multi-processor is really not a requirement.

I hope that's helpful.  Please email back if you've got any other=20
questions (and we'll try and respond quicker next time!).


Russell

[Cobalt-general] Hardware requirements of BOSS

[Harri <har...@tu...>]

Hello,

what are in your experience the hardware requirements for a BOSS
server running all three servers for a group of 100 to 200 students
and set for about 10 autotests per submission? The server will contain
the mysql server too.

How much memory will be needed? How much processing power should be
available? Would you suggest a multiprocessor system?

Yours,
Harri J=E4rvi

[Cobalt-general] BOSS V3.0 alpha 1 released

[Daniel W. <bo...@dc...>]

We are releasing a copy of the current CVS tree at the University of
Warwick as, for the last few weeks, intensive development work has taken
place to upgrade BOSS. New features include:

-> A web client for using BOSS from a website rather than the previous 
java application client.
-> A new updated GUI for the application clients.
-> JUnit testing of student submissions
-> Sherlock plagiarism detector now included with capabilities to detect 
plagiarism on natural language submissions as well as source-code 
submissions.
-> Simple database caching to speed access to the coresoft database
-> Various bug fixes

Please bear in mind that this is a development version of the code and as
such, not all features are currently available in the new clients as we
haven't written the code yet! Also, the documentation is hopelessly out of
date. A feature-complete, tested, documented and stable version of the
software will be available soon.


---
Daniel White
University of Warwick
Personal email: D.R...@wa...
Work email: bo...@dc...

[Cobalt-general] Setting up Student tests: request for an HOWTO

[Jobling C.P. <C.P...@sw...>]

How does one set up a programming exercise for a student? The documentation
describes how the database is informed of a test but details are scant as to
how the actual Java code is tested. 

 

Presumably a teacher would need to devise some Java test class that
exercises the student's code but what form does this take. Where is it
located? How is BOSS/Cobalt made aware of it. Where is the link established
between the test code and the assignment?

 

Let's say that my first exercise is "hello world" and I want to have my
students write a class

 

class Hello

{   String sayHello()

    {   return "Hello, World!";

    }

}

 

A suitable test would be:

 

class HelloTest

{   public static void main(String[] args)

    {   Hello h = new Hello();

        String test = n.sayHello();

        if ("Hello, World!".equals(test))

           System.out.println("Test passes");

        else

           System.out.println("Test fails");

     }

}

 

Taking this example, could you possibly tell us how BOSS actually would be
set up to mark a solution to the Hello class. I'm sure it would help
everyone who is evaluating BOSS.

 

Chris

 

Dr Chris P. Jobling [C.P...@Sw...] School of Engineering
University of Wales Swansea, Singleton park, Swansea SA2 8PP, UK.

Tel: +44 1792 295580; Fax: +44 1792 295686

WWW: http:/www-ee.swan.ac.uk/DeptEEE/People/cv/cpj.html
<http://www-ee.swan.ac.uk/DeptEEE/People/cv/cpj.html>