Grid5000:UsagePolicy

General Principles

Grid'5000 is a scientific instrument supporting experiment-driven research in all areas of computer science, including high performance computing, distributed computing, networking and big data. The use of Grid'5000 should lead to results or contribute to education in those research areas.

This charter defines rules to allow the shared use of this infrastructure by different communities of users, with different needs.

If your intended usage does not fit within the detailed rules presented below, you request a special permission from the executive committee (resp-sites_gis_g5k@inria.fr). Such exceptions are granted on a regular basis, as can be seen on the page listing those.

Resource usages rules

Glossary

To request resources on the platform, you can submit jobs (tasks) using two different modes: submissions and reservations.

• Submission: you submit a job and let the scheduler decide when to run it.
• Reservation: you submit a job for a specific date and time in the future.

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 resources.
• Job size: the size of a job is defined by the cpu time usable by the job: (nb nodes) * (nb cores) * (job walltime). A 2 hours job using 32 dual-processor dual core nodes has a size of 256 cpu.h.

Rules

1. You should not be submitting jobs or making reservations if your experiment is not described in your User report.
2. Large scale jobs must be executed during nights or week-ends (generally, using reservations to reserve resources in advance). Daytime is dedicated to smaller scale experiments, and preparatory work for large scale experiments. Specifically:
   1. Between 09:00 and 19:00 (local time of the cluster) during working days (monday to friday), 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).
   2. It is generally considered rude to have jobs that cross the 09:00 and 19:00 boundaries during week days (to extend an overnight reservation, for example).
   3. You should not have job that last more than 14h outside week-end.
   4. You are not allowed to have more than 2 reservations in advance.
3. You must mention Grid'5000 in all publications presenting results or contents obtained or derived from the usage of Grid'5000 and you must either specify Grid'5000 in the collaboration field if you upload a reference to a HAL frontend or update your User report with a reference to your publication. The official acknowledgement to use in your publication is the following:

Experiments presented in this paper were carried out using the Grid'5000 testbed, supported by a scientific interest group hosted by Inria and including CNRS, RENATER and several Universities as well as other organizations (see https://www.grid5000.fr).

Specific rules for open access users

1. Open Access users should not to use OAR's "Advance reservations" more than 24 hours in advance

Monitoring

Platform usage is actively monitored by the Grid'5000 staff. In case of usage not following the above rules, your account will be locked. The account of users whose user report is insufficiently filled with regard to their resource usage might also be locked. The monitoring automatically detects usage not matching those rules, with some limitations:

• resources are managed at the site level, but the charter rules are expressed at the cluster level
• current versions of OAR have no concept of charter when scheduling submissions
• monitoring tools automatically remove DEAD nodes from their calculations of cluster size

It is possible that Grid'5000 usage is flagged as not following the charter as a result of events that are urelated to users. This, as well as authorized exceptions, explains why the technical team will not act pro-actively. If incorrect usage is detrimental to you, please mail support-staff@lists.grid5000.fr to start investigations.

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).

Report an Abusive Usage

This form may be used to report a Grid'5000 usage that is not conform to the Grid'5000 charter and that is preventing you to access resources you need for your work. It will send an email to the offending user and to his managers, asking them to terminate jobs that do not fit within the charter. It will also warn Grid'5000 staff who are instructed to kill these jobs if it is not done by the user. Don't forget to check ongoing special permissions.