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The OpenScienceLab Environment and the Account Lifecycle

Account Lifecycle

  • Accounts will be deactivated on the 46th day of inactivity.
  • Warning emails are sent to inactive users after 30, 35, 40, 44, and 45 days.
  • The user volume and snapshot are permanently destroyed upon account deactivation.

NB: While the above is valid for the OpenSARLab deployment, each deployment's lifecycle period may differ. Since the OpenSARLab is the most commonly used deployment, the information listed on this page will mainly focus on the OpenSARLab deployment.

OpenSARLab Environment

Every OpenSARLab user has access to an Amazon AWS EC2 instance. Depending on demand, the individual user shares their resources with up to 3 users.

Operating System

  • Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS

Volume (storage)

  • *500GB of EBS volume storage per user.

*Volume size subject to change.

OpenSARLab uses Amazon AWS EBS volumes mounted on user servers' home directories for storage. Since volumes are costly to maintain, any inactive accounts will have their volumes destroyed and replaced with the latest snapshot as a backup within a few days.

Important Notes about Volume

  • If your volume has been destroyed, the latest snapshot will regenerate a new EBS volume upon the next login. Upon successful login, your account should be identical from your previous session.
  • When regenerating the volume from the snapshot, it can take some time (10+ minutes) to restore all the data. Notebooks may load slower than usual during this period.
  • If users occupy more space than allocated, it will trigger the out-of-storage exception that will prevent users from logging in.

Snapshot (Backup)

A snapshot is a backup copy of users' volume. The snapshot of each volume is taken every day at 10:00 UTC. Only the most recent snapshot is retained.

The user storage is persistent; you will only lose saved work if your account is inactive for 46 days.

Memory (RAM)

  • RAM allocated per user: 6GB - 16GB

The amount of memory available to each user depends on the overall instance and may vary from 6 GB to 16 GB. The number of users on the same instance determines the amount of usable memory.

Privileges

  • Users do not have root (i.e., sudo) privileges.