Tutorial or Teaching Labs HowTo

How-to organize a tutorial

Contact Grid'5000 people

First, you must inform Grid'5000 committee that you intend to organize a tutorial. Send an email to resp-sites_gis_g5k@inria.fr with the following information:

• A short description of the tutorial. Example: "This tutorial will present tools available in Grid'5000 for Cloud related experimentation and will take place in IC2E 2014 conference in Boston"
• The tutorial date. Example: "March 10th, from 5pm to 11pm (Paris timezone)"
• A group name, which will be used by tutorial participants. Example: "ic2e2014"
• Your Grid'5000 account name (login). Example "My login is sdelamare"
• If you plan to use more resources than allowed by charter, please ask for authorization. Example: "I would like to use 500 cores during 6 hours for the tutorial"

Once approved, the Grid'5000 committee and technical team will:

• Reply to your email
• Create the group in our User Management System
• Add the "site-manager" privilege to your account (you will be able to approve accounts belonging to this group)
• If the tutorial requires more resources than allowed by charter, it will be added to Grid5000:SpecialUsage page.

Resource reservation

Depending on your needs, you can consider reserve Grid'5000 resources in advance.

You probably don't need to reserve resources if:

• Your tutorial occurs during charter restriction period (daytime in Paris timezone)
• and/or it does not require many resources
• and/or it does not have many participants

If you still want to reserve your resources in advance, the best strategy is to reserve them as usual in Grid'5000, and kill your reservation just before the beginning of your tutorial. If the tutorial duration is important, you can use several reservations and kill them as the tutorial progress.

Participants accounts

The tutorial participants must ask for an account themselves, using the registration form available at [1].

Here are the mandatory information to use for tutorial participants:

• "Account expiration": It must be later than the end of the tutorial (but not much later).
• "SSH public key": It must be the content of the SSH public key that will be used by the participant during the tutorial
• "Manager": It must be the tutorial's organizer Grid'5000 account name (the one you should have supplied by email to Grid'5000 committee)
• "Site": It must be "guest"
• "Group": It must be the group name associated to the tutorial (again, you should have mentioned it in your email to Grid'5000 committee and it should have been created)
• "Privilege": It must be "User"

When possible, you can ask your participants to create their accounts in advance. Otherwise, it is perfectly fine to create the accounts at the beginning of the tutorial.

When an account request is submitted, you should receive an email asking you to approve the account create (of course, we assume here that every mandatory information mentioned before have been correctly filled). Before approving the account, please check that the information submitted by the participant are correct.

Note: account's /home directories are created by a cron job that runs every 5 minutes.

About Grid'5000 connexion using SSH

Past experiences show that many problems are related to Grid'5000 connexion with SSH keys. To use Grid'5000, participants should have basic knowledge of SSH, and especially know how to generate SSH private and public keys and use them to connect to a server without needing a password. Don't hesitate to spend time at the beginning of the tutorial to explain it. More information on this topic is available at SSH and Getting_Started#Connecting_for_the_first_time_and_preparing_your_SSH_environment.

After the tutorial

Once the tutorial finishes, you can suggest your participants to request an account extension (if they are affiliated to French academics) or to apply to our Open Access program.