Grid5000:UsagePolicy

You are a Grid'5000 citizen

Principles

Grid'5000 is a scientific instrument designed to support experiment-driven research in all areas of computer science related to parallel, large-scale or distributed computing and networking

Experiments using Grid'5000 should lead to results in those research fields and use the resources as a model of real-world resources. However, it is acceptable, after approval from the executive committee, to use available resources in a low-priority mode to generate useful results for other communities, especially if this generates results that are also relevant to the main research fields of Grid'5000.

As securing resources for large scale experiments (at least 3 sites and 1000 CPUs) can be difficult in the absence of specific rules, and because these experiments are a driving factor for a multi-site instrument, these are favoured by the user's charter and the different rules applied when operating the instrument. Nevertheless, research at a smaller (local) scale is also welcome on Grid'5000.

If your intended usage does not quite fit whithin the bounds of this user charter, you have to ask the executive committee (comdir-aladdin@inria.fr) to get a special permission for your experiment. The executive committee regularly grants such exceptions, as can be seen in the page listing those.

It is a shared tool, used by many people with different and varying needs. The administrators pursue the following objectives, the main one being the first of this list:

1. Make the tool available to experiments involving a significant number of nodes (in the 1000's). To make this possible, reservation fragmentation must be avoided as much as possible.
2. Keep the platform available for the development of experiments during the day. Therefore, reservations using all the nodes available on one site during work hours (in France) should be avoided in general.

Glossary

You can use the platform with two different modes: submissions and reservations.

• Submission: you submit an experiment when you let the scheduler decide when to run it.
• Reservation: when you make a reservation, you gain usage of the platform at the time you explicitly specified. You will then need to launch your experiment interactively.

The different sites participating in Grid'5000 do not have clusters of the same size. Therefore, you should take into account job size when you plan an experiment.

• Experiment: An experiment is typically composed of one or more jobs running on Grid'5000's clusters.
• Job size: the size of a job is defined by the cpu time usable by the job: (nb nodes) * (nb procs) * (nb cores) * (job walltime). A 2 hours job using 32 bi-processor dual core nodes has a size of 256h.

Good usage rules (All users)

1. Please try to plan large scale experiments during night-time or week-ends.
2. Between 09:00 and 19:00 (local time of the cluster) during working days, you should not use more than the equivalent of 2 hours on all the cores of the cluster during a given day (e.g. on a 64 bi-processor (dual core) cluster, you should not use more than 2*2**2*64 = 512h between 09:00 and 19:00 CEST). Extending an overnight reservation to include this daily quota is considered rude, as you already had your fair share of platform usage with the overnight reservation.
3. You should not have more than 2 reservations in advance, because it kills down resource usage. Please optimize and submit jobs instead.
4. you should not have job that last more than 14h outside week-end, even for a small amount of nodes, as this increases fragmentation of the platform.
5. You should not be submitting jobs or making reservations if your experiment is not described in your User report.
6. You must mention Grid'5000 in all publications presenting results or contents obtained or derived from the usage of Grid'5000 and you must update your User report. The official acknowledgment to use in your publication must be the following:

 Acknowledgment:
 
 Experiments presented in this paper were carried out using the Grid'5000
 experimental testbed, being developed under the INRIA ALADDIN development 
 action with support from CNRS, RENATER and several Universities as well 
 as other funding bodies (see https://www.grid5000.fr).

Good usage rules (Local users)

Some sites have opened user accounts on a local branch of LDAP. Users on these local branches only have access to the local cluster. In addition to the above rules, they should:

1. not have more than 1 reservation in advance;
2. prefer submissions (let oar decide when to run the job) to reservations (specifying a time when the job should run) as much as possible;
3. limit the size of their jobs to reasonable proportions such as those locally defined by the local site they have access to (e.g. in Rennes, this would be around 1280h).

Monitoring

Platform usage is actively monitored by Grid'5000 staff. In case of unconform use, your account will be locked. Unconform use includes users whose user report is unsufficiently filled with regard to their resource usage.

Mailing Lists

As a Grid'5000 user you are automatically subscribed to the Grid'5000 users' mailing lists. The traffic is not very high, so please keep an eye on those emails as they may contain important information (see Mailing lists for more information).