run_serialized decorator hangs on SageMathCloud

[rjleveque]

I might have raised this issue before since I first ran into this last fall, but I'm using SMC for the first time in a while and just ran into it again -- the decorator @run_serialized at line 65 of src/pyclaw/util.py has to be commented out or else visclaw/src/python/visclaw/plotpages hangs when importing this module, when trying to make plots on SMC.

[mandli]

Do you know where exactly it's hanging? We could possibly modify the decorator to return back the function if this is causing issues if we can detect when this might happen.

[rjleveque]

The notes I made last fall indicated I thought it was a petsc problem but I don't know why I thought that...

[mandli]

It looks like pesc4py is available on sage math cloud but then hangs when it tries to initialize PETSc. I would hazard a guess that this is a bug then on SMC. Looking around I don't see an easy way to time out.

[ketch]

That's pretty annoying. The import is inside a try statement, so even if it just failed cleanly that would be fine.

[ketch]

One workaround would be to uninstall petsc4py locally, though I don't know if you have permissions to do that.

[mandli]

One of the recent PRs @rjleveque did contained an admittedly fragile way to try to figure out if someone is running on SMC. Maybe use that in the mean time and report the bug to SMC?

[ketch]

@mandli That sounds good to me.