Account & Access#

Getting an Account#

If you are interested in trying out the testbed, please contact us via mail: testbed@nes-lab.org. We will provide you a registration-token in time. This token is bound to the e-mail address and allows creating an account. Please read through the disclaimer and privacy policy prior to registration.

Note

  1. Your e-mail address is acting as your account name and is needed on the server for sending updates on i.e. finished experiments.

  2. To comply with privacy law, we will disable accounts that have been inactive for 18 month and delete the account in the following clean-up-cycle, no later than 6 months after deactivation.

  3. The testbed is a best-effort service. Availability and functionality is not guaranteed.

Quota#

To ensure a good user-experience for everyone we will start with the following fair-use quotas:

  • Duration of an experiment is limited to 60 minutes. Submissions to the testbed must have a valid duration specified.

  • Storage of each user is limited to 200 GiB. Users being over quota won’t be able to schedule new experiments. Old data must be deleted first from the testbed-server.

It’s by no means a one-size-fits-all. If your setup requires temporary customization of quotas, feel free to contact us.

Tip

The getting started guide includes a section that highlights options to reduce the size of result-files.

Registration & Access#

To access the testbed, you will need the webclient written in Python. You can install the client by using the package-manager of your choice. In the following case we use pip:

pip3 install shepherd-client -U

With it, you can manage your account and experiments. You have the option to save your credentials in your XDG-config-directory (i.e. $HOME/.config/shepherd). That way you can safely host your later scripts in public repositories without leaking data. For registering an account you can fill out & run the following snippet once:

from shepherd_client import Client

client = Client("my@mail.com", password="1234", save_credentials=True, debug=True)
client.register_user(token="XYZ")

A few notes to explain the behavior:

  • registration is possible as soon as you receive a custom token via mail

  • passwords need to be between 10 and 64 characters (all printable ASCII)

  • if you omit the password, the client will create a custom one for you

  • it is possible to trigger a forgot-password-routine (you can also back up the config-file)

  • choosing save_credentials will overwrite the local config (or create a new one)

Once saved, you can omit the credentials, as shown here:

from shepherd_client import Client

client = Client()
print(client.get_user_info())

The next steps are explained in the getting started guide