Services

JASMIN’s main purpose is to provide large-scale data analysis facilities to support data-intensive environmental science. To enable this, it provides a number of services in a unique purpose-built architecture to enable groups of scientists to work together collaboratively with large datasets. We can group (and colour-code!) these service groups as follows:

User-facing services

These are arranged as follows as the services which users can access:

These services are briefly described below, but for full details of how to access and use JASMIN and its component services, please consult our extensive documentation and training workshop materials.

Information services

Name	Also known as	Details
Helpdesk	support@jasmin.ac.uk www.ceda.ac.uk/blog	Helpdesk for user queries. Announcements about JASMIN are included in communications made by the CEDA Team via email, news items and tweets.
JASMIN Documentation Site	https://help.jasmin.ac.uk	Collection of documentation articles covering all aspects of JASMIN.
Beacon		Tool present on both this site and the JASMIN Documentation Site for initiating queries to the Helpdesk.
Metrics		Dashboards showing available resources and usage information.
Status		Information about service status, known issues and upcoming maintenance.
Training		Training and user engagement events organised by the CEDA Team.

Access services

Name	Also known as	Details
Accounts portal	https://accounts.jasmin.ac.uk	Portal for management of user accounts and access privileges.
Login servers	login	Point of access for most users
NX-login servers	nx-login	Login servers provding graphical desktop service.
Transfer servers	xfer	For moving data in/out of JASMIN
High-performance transfer	hpxfer, globus	Services for high-performance/bulk data movement.

Analysis compute services

Name	Also known as	Details
Scientific analysis servers	sci	Interactive compute nodes for developing & testing code
Batch processing cluster	lotus	~14,000 core mini-HPC for data analysis processing. Currently dominated by CPU nodes, some GPU nodes coming soon.
Software	jaspy	Common Python-based software environment and additional components.
JASMIN Notebooks service		Provides a web-based interactive Python notebook to experiment with code and data.

Storage services

Name	Also known as	Details
Home	/home/users	Home directory for user configuration files, code and other small but important data which need to be backed up.
Group Workspaces	GWS	Large-scale (1TB to 1PB) but short-term (<5yrs) collaborative storage made available to a group for the duration of a project. GWS manager responsible for organisation of data and controlling access. Comprise storage of different types: disk, tape and object storage.
Transfer Cache	XFC	Per-user temporary multi-TB storage with automated usage limits, ideal for re-working data brought in from external sources before transferring to GWS tape or disk storage.
Scratch		Temporary storage provided for intermediate data when using the LOTUS batch processing cluster.
CEDA Archive		Long-term curated data archive of Atmospheric science, Climate model and Earth Observation data. Available read-only throughout JASMIN for easy processing.
Joint Data Migration Application	JDMA Elastic Tape	Application for copying/moving data between different media, including tape, disk and object storage.

Community Cloud

Name	Also known as	Details
Cloud portal	https://cloud.jasmin.ac.uk	Portal for management of cloud tenancies. Allows deployment of virtual machines from catalogue of provided templates.
Managed tenancy		Enables communities to have their own "sci" machine(s) over which they have some control.
External tenancy		Portions of cloud infrastructure in which projects can build their own bespoke computing infrastructure, from scratch - for example a project website - or using prebuilt templates using JASMIN's Cluster-as-a-Service (CaaS) system.

Network services

Name	Also known as	Details
Cloud zone	cloud
Data transfer zone	DTZ	Special area of network (shared with Cloud zone) situated outside STFC network for external tenancies and efficient data transfer operations.