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Happy Holidays Mathematica Users:<br>
<br>
I will resend this message in early January so feel free to stop
reading and delete it. I'm sending it now while it's top of mind
to me, and because some of you may want to think about this over the
break.<br>
<br>
The TRIUMF Mathematica shared-licenses and contract are up for
renewal. We generally negotiate a 3-year contract so it's
important that we understand any plans or expectations that you
have. There is also budget pressure to reduce the number of
shared licenses that TRIUMF purchases. This is exacerbated by the
poor exchange-rate between Canadian and US currency.<br>
<br>
If you have any input on your usage of Mathematica, especially on
the following topics, then please provide feedback in a reply to
this message. See <b>Reply-To Address</b> below.<br>
<ul>
<li>Are you interested in using <b>Mathematica Online</b> (more
info below) to replace some or all of your local usage of
Mathematica?<br>
<br>
</li>
<li>Do you anticipate phasing out, or reducing your usage of
Mathematica?<br>
<br>
</li>
<li>Could you reduce or replace your usage of Mathematica with
something else, especially Jupyter or MATLAB?<br>
</li>
</ul>
<b>Reply-To Address</b><b><br>
</b><br>
A reply to this message will be sent to mathemtica-license [@]
triumf.ca which is a shared mailbox used by IS&T. Don't do
Reply-All which will include the list address and my personal
address.<br>
<br>
<b>Mathematica License-Usage in 2024</b><b><br>
</b><br>
For the past dozen years or so, TRIUMF has purchased ten floating
network-licenses which are accompanied by ten home-use licenses and
80 licenses for cluster-computing. The following shows the
maximum number of in-use licenses each day of 2024 up to Dec 23.
There was extremely-low usage of the cluster-computing licenses so I
have not include usage graph of them.<br>
<img src="cid:part1.tQ4k6tYX.w6B1cI5W@triumf.ca" alt="" class=""><br>
There's a couple of things to note here:<br>
<ul>
<li>We never reached the ten-license limit</li>
<li>We only went above six licenses on 58 out 358 days</li>
<li>There is always at least one, frequently more licenses used
every day including weekends</li>
</ul>
<p>The conclusion of the latter two points indicates that some
people are probably leaving mathematica open on their workstations
when not using it.<br>
<br>
One possibility is to replace some of the Mathematica
network-licenses with Mathematica-Online licenses. This would
reduce the number of static home-use licenses by the same amount,
though there would be less need for them by users of Mathematica
Online. It would also reduce the number of cluster-computing
licenses by eight times the number of network-licenses that are
replaced. This would not be a significant loss given the
historic use of the cluster-computing licenses.<b><br>
</b></p>
<p><b>Mathematica Online</b><b><br>
</b><b> </b><br>
For a description see:<br>
<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="https://wolfram.com/mathematica/online">https://wolfram.com/mathematica/online<br>
</a><br>
At the moment, I'm not sure of the amount of cloud-storage
provided per user, but I think it's in the vicinity of 50GB.
However, just like a local instance of Mathematica, Mathematica
Online includes built-in functionality for interacting with
various external storage-systems, such as Amazon S3, or the
Arbutus-Cloud storage provided by the Digital Research-Alliance of
Canada; formerly Compute Canada. The TRIUMF IS&T
Research-Computing-Services team is also in planning a deployment
of a storage system that will include an S3 interface. We hope
to have it available by late spring.<br>
<br>
Thus, if you use Mathematica to analyse large files, such as
experiment data or the output of a simulation, you could<b> </b>store
them in Arbutus-Cloud, or the TRIUMF storage, and use Mathematica
Online for the analysis.<b><br>
</b></p>
<p><b>Reminder - Close Mathematica when you're not using it</b><br>
</p>
<b> </b>When you start mathematica at TRIUMF, it requests a license
from the license server, and periodically renews it. When the
license limit is reached, new requests will be denied. So it is
important to close Mathematica whenever you are not actively using
it so that the license will be returned to the pool.<br>
<br>
<b>Requesting Help</b><br>
<br>
For help with installing or upgrading Mathematica use the
General-Support queue of TRIUMF helpdesk. TRIUMF's license also
includes technical-support from Wolfram but your email address must
be registered. You can request registration via the
General-Support queue of helpdesk.<br>
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