Grid5000:UsagePolicy

General principles

Grid'5000 is a scientific instrument supporting experiment-driven research in all areas of computer science, with a focus on distributed computing, high performance computing, big data and networking. Its use should lead to results or contribute to education in this area. Access policy is detailed on that page.

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 can 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.

Acknowledging Grid'5000 usage in publications

Grid'5000 must be acknowledged in all publications presenting results or contents obtained or derived from the usage of Grid'5000. All those publications must be added to the Grid'5000 collection on the HAL Open Archive. This can be achieved by adding your publication to HAL (possibly without the full text), and specifying "GRID5000" in the collaboration field. 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).

Resources reservation

Experiments performed on Grid'5000 typically require several resources reservations (or tasks, or jobs). Resources can be reserved using three different queues (default, production, besteffort), with different usage policies described below. Unless specified otherwise, jobs are submitted in the default queue. It is possible to reserve resources as soon as possible (submissions, typically for small-scale reservations) or using advance reservations (for larger-scale experiments, during nights and week-ends).

Notes:

• On the technical level, resources reservations are handled by the OAR resource manager. When using the command line interface, the queue is selected using the -q switch (e.g.: oarsub -q besteffort -I).
• The usage of the testbed is actively monitored by the Grid'5000 staff. In case of usage not following the above rules, your account will be locked. This form can be used to report a Grid'5000 usage that does not meet those rules and is preventing you to access the resources you need for your work. You can also contact the Grid'5000 staff directly (support-staff@lists.grid5000.fr).

Rules for the default queue

Daytime is dedicated to smaller scale experiments, and preparatory work for large scale experiments. Large scale jobs must be executed during nights or week-ends (generally, using advance reservations). Specifically:

1. Between 09:00 and 19:00 (Europe/Paris timezone) during working days (Monday to Friday, excluding public holidays in France), 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 (quad core) cluster, you should not use more than (2 hours)*(2 CPU)*(4 cores)*(64 nodes)= 1024 core.hours).
2. Your jobs must not cross the 09:00 and 19:00 boundaries during week days (to extend an overnight reservation, for example). (This also means that you must not have job that last more than 14 hours outside week-ends.)
3. You are not allowed to have more than 2 reservations in advance. Open Access users must not make advance reservations more than 24 hours in advance. (those two rules are enforced by the resources reservation system).

Rules for the production queue

The production queue provides access to a different and smaller set of resources (only located in the Nancy site for time being), with a policy that is more suited to long-running, non-interactive jobs. See this page for more information.

Access to the production queue is restricted to members of organizations that are directly supporting Grid'5000. As of 2016-03-01, those are:

• members of the following laboratories: CReSTIC (Reims), I3S (Sophia Antipolis), IRISA (Rennes), IRIT (Toulouse), LIFL (Lille), LIG (Grenoble), LIP (Lyon), LORIA (Nancy), CSC (Luxembourg)
• members of the following Inria research centers: Grenoble - Rhône-Alpes, Lille - Nord Europe, Nancy - Grand Est, Rennes - Bretagne Atlantique, Sophia Antipolis - Méditerranée

Rules for the besteffort queue

The besteffort queue provides a way to submit low-priority, interruptible jobs. Access to the besteffort queue is not restricted at this point. If you are planning to use the besteffort queue for large scale experiments, you should contact the Grid'5000 staff beforehand.

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). More than 500 users are subscribed to those lists, so please be careful before asking questions on the lists.