Cipres Science Gateway

CIPRES Science Gateway usage has grown dramatically (10-fold) over the past 16 months. In the last year CSG users consumed around 8 million CPU hours of TeraGrid time, and the consumption is increasing. The good news is that the CSG helped a lot of people get their research done; the bad news is that our usage is growing so quickly that we must begin to impose a limit on the number of CPU hours any user can consume.

Starting August 1, 2011, standard individual user accounts will be limited to 30,000 CPU hours per year. This change will not affect 98% of CSG users, but it will impact a small subset of all users. Details of the revised Fair Use Policy are posted on the CSG Website here http://www.phylo.org/tools/use_policy.html  .

We wish to emphasize the following points regarding the new policy:

1. Any user, anywhere, can still register and consume up to 30,000 CPU hours of compute time.

2. Users at US institutions can consume up to 50,000 CPU hours of compute time.

3. We have added to tools to help each user monitor their usage:

• In the task management area of the web interface, you will find a new icon that presents your cumulative CPU consumption since August 1, 2011. This will help you understand what your usage is, for planning purposes.
  
  
• You will receive automatic email notices when your account reaches 10,000, 20,000 and 30,000 CPU hours.
  
  
• In the near future, we will provide tools that show how many CPU hours your job will consume as currently configured.

4. We will not disable user account submissions without first attempting to communicate with the user who will be impacted.

5. Recently, a number of large MrBayes jobs have failed due to problems with the Trestle file system. We monitor events like this, and will credit user accounts for time lost due to error from TeraGrid machines or the CSG portal.

6. Users at US institutions and with US collaborators can continue running jobs on the CSG beyond the established limit. This can be done by creating a personal allocation for your lab group. This process is not terribly complex, and instructions for this are now on the CSG Web site at http://www.phylo.org/tools/request_allocation.html . We are happy to support users in establishing these accounts.

The policy is being implemented so we can make the CSG available and sustainable for the largest possible number of users. Please contact us with any questions, comments or suggestions.