Important update to CLIMB-BIG-DATA Terms and conditions

We are introducing new Terms and Conditions for CLIMB-BIG-DATA in our ongoing commitment to providing top-notch services and enhancing user experience. These updates, effective from August 1st, 2023, bring exciting changes aimed at refining and optimizing your interactions with our platform.

Click here to read the new Terms and Conditions.

What’s New?

The updated Terms and Conditions encompass several enhancements designed to better align with your needs and streamline your usage of CLIMB-BIG-DATA. One of the notable updates pertains to the Free Tier Entitlements:

  1. Free Account User Entitlements: We are revamping the offerings for our free-tier users to ensure a balanced and beneficial experience for all. While Virtual Machines and volume storage will be exclusively available to our paying users, we have introduced a new approach to maintain your access to CLIMB-BIG-DATA’s computing prowess. Under the free account tier, you will now have 14 CPUs per team. Additionally, you’ll be granted access to 1TB of shared team storage and 1TB of S3 storage. This allocation empowers each team to leverage 8 vCPUs for launching standard Jupyter Notebooks, while the remaining 6 vCPUs can be harnessed for NextFlow tasks.
  2. Transition Timeline: To ensure a seamless adjustment period, we will begin enforcing the new Terms and Conditions starting October 1st, 2023. This provides you with ample time to become familiar with the changes and adapt to the new usage model. On October 1st, we will archive all Virtual Machines and temporarily suspend access to volume storage.

Benefits of the Transition

Our decision to transition users to Jupyter Notebooks is driven by the multitude of advantages they offer, especially in the realm of microbial bioinformatics. Here are some key benefits you can expect from this transition:

  1. Efficiency: Jupyter Notebooks provide instant access to commonly used reference databases, expediting your analytical workflows.
  2. Preconfigured Pipelines: The inclusion of preconfigured Nextflow pipelines simplifies and accelerates your analysis pipelines.
  3. User-Friendly Interface: The web-based interface allows seamless access to command-line tools, Python, and RStudio environments, facilitating a smoother workflow.

Getting Started with Jupyter Notebooks

To help you get started with Jupyter Notebooks, we have prepared detailed documentation available at docs.climb.ac.uk. Here’s a quick step-by-step guide to launch a Notebook via the Bryn interface:

  1. Log in to Bryn.
  2. Navigate to ‘Compute’ in the left-hand menu and select ‘Notebook servers.’
  3. Click the ‘Launch notebook server’ green action button.
  4. Choose ‘Standard server.’
  5. Click ‘Launch Server’ and monitor the progress bar.
  6. Once ready, click the URL beneath ‘User notebook server.’
  7. Upon your first login, you may need to authorize access to your Bryn account by clicking ‘Authorize.’

Migration to S3 Storage

For a seamless transition, we recommend initiating the migration of your data from volumes to S3 storage at your earliest convenience. You can access your S3 buckets through the Bryn interface under “S3 buckets” in the ‘Compute’ section or by using the ‘s3cmd ls’ command in the Notebook terminal.