CloudLab
cloudlab.us · 3 records in Compute, Storage · JSON
Records 3
- fails: identityCloudLab
Computefree tieridentity institutionno cardlimit write-gatedevidence documentedstale on 2026-11-22
- fails: identityCloudLab c240g1 / per-node local blockstore (40 TB)
Storagefree tieridentity institutionno cardevidence reportedstale on 2026-11-05
- fails: identityCloudLab persistent remote dataset (10 TB, iSCSI)
Storagefree tieridentity institutionno cardevidence reportedstale on 2026-11-05
CloudLab
Compute- Free allowance
- CloudLab gives free bare-metal nodes with no allocation accounting at all: "Registering doesn't cost anything, it's simply for accountability.
- Verdict
- fails: identitythe identity required is not reachable without it
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- institutionno card, no phone
- Binding limit
- write-gatedCreating a project requires being "faculty, senior research staff, or in some other senior position" and passes a staff review that takes a few days; joining one requires the leader's approval, so an unaffiliated person cannot obtain...
- Evidence
- documented5 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-22checked 2026-10-22 (live); stale on 2026-11-22
| Free tier | CloudLab gives free bare-metal nodes with no allocation accounting at all: "Registering doesn't cost anything, it's simply for accountability. We just ask that if you're going to use CloudLab for anything other than light use, you tell us a bit more about who you are." The Utah cluster alone is 9,336 cores across 1,000-plus nodes, including 28 nodes of 32-core AMD EPYC 7452 with 100Gb Ethernet and 36 nodes of 24-core EPYC 7402P with 25/100Gb links. unit GiB; metered on wall-clock; unmetered-bare-metal |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits |
|
| Identity | institution not published |
| Egress | not stated |
| Interface | unknown inferred from the tooling the provider documents; not probed |
| Tooling | not stated |
| Composes with | The absence of a quota is the unusual part and it is what makes CloudLab usable for a long-running measurement rather than a benchmark: a project can hold nodes for days provided the profile reserves them, which is the shape a network or storage experiment needs and which no credit-based programme provides. |
| Reliability | no reliability event recorded |
| Notes | This is the only provider with no allocation counter, so the constraint is purely the project-leader gate plus node availability. Disk and RAM per node are not on the page read and are left null rather than estimated. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 5
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-22 | docs.cloudlab.us/users.html | "Registering doesn't cost anything, it's simply for accountability", quoted |
| 2026-10-22 | docs.cloudlab.us/users.html | "We therefore require that project leaders be faculty, senior research staff, or others who are relatively senior positions"; "You should only start a new project if you are a faculty member, senior research staff, or in some other senior position", quoted |
| 2026-10-22 | docs.cloudlab.us/users.html | a new project application "will be reviewed by our staff" and "The review process may take a few days", quoted |
| 2026-10-22 | docs.cloudlab.us/hardware.html | Utah cluster is 9,336 cores; d6515 is 28 nodes of 32-core AMD 7452 with 100Gb Ethernet; c6525-100g is 36 nodes of 24-core AMD 7402P with 25/100Gb, quoted |
| 2026-10-22 | docs.cloudlab.us/hardware.html | the four GPU-capable d750 nodes are "not available for general use. CloudLab staff will grant access to your project on request", quoted |
More fields 1
| facets | {"class": "open-science-grid","free_tier_kind": "unmetered-bare-metal","shape": {"vcpu": 32,"ram_gib": null,"gpu_class": null,"gpu_count": null}} |
|---|
Unknown values 7
- egress metered: egress metering was not published
- egress terms: a source was read and is silent on this field
- interface: the access interface was not established
- per object cap stated: the field does not apply to this kind of offer
- reliability note: nothing of this kind was observed
- retention stated: the field does not apply to this kind of offer
- tooling: a source was read and is silent on this field
- Free allowance
- C240g1 node type = 12 x 3 TB HDDs (36 TB raw) on 5 nodes at Wisconsin; the storage table prices a 'per-node local blockstore' at 90GB-40TB, so a multi-TB blockstore is requestable by size in the profile and the system picks a node type
- Verdict
- fails: identitythe identity required is not reachable without it
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- institutionno card, no phone
- Binding limit
- noneno named constraint binds
- Evidence
- reported6 sources; a third party said so
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-05checked 2026-10-21 (inherited); stale on 2026-11-05
| Free tier | c240g1 node type = 12 x 3 TB HDDs (36 TB raw) on 5 nodes at Wisconsin; the storage table prices a 'per-node local blockstore' at 90GB-40TB, so a multi-TB blockstore is requestable by size in the profile and the system picks a node type unit TB; metered on stored-bytes |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits |
local datasets are ALWAYS ephemeral - node disks are re-imaged after every experiment use, and the manual is explicit that infrastructure is 'not a storage provider' and node disks are 'not configure[d] in any redundant way'. Default experiment lifetime is 'a few hours'; extensions need a written justification reviewed by staff, indefinite needs the steering committee. Usage is metered in node-hours, not bytes. The Emulab parent facility has BYTE-IDENTICAL terms and shares the account: 'Emulab is a public facility, available without charge to most researchers worldwide', but project leaders must still be 'faculty, senior research staff, or others who are relatively senior positions', and an Emulab login is accepted directly as a CloudLab login - so it is a second door onto the same hardware with the same institutional lock. |
| Identity | institution institution |
| Egress | free - nodes are on 10-25 Gb experiment fabric plus a 1-25 Gb control link to the internet; no byte meter of any kind |
| Per-object cap | not stated |
| Retention | Default experiment lifetime is 'a few hours'; extensions need a written justification reviewed by staff, indefinite needs the steering committee |
| Interface | s3, webdav, scp, rsync, ssh ssh (key-only) + root/sudo on real hardware; anything you install - S3, WebDAV, rsync, nginx |
| Tooling | geni-lib RSpec profiles, portal API token, terraform-provider-cloudlab, ssh/scp |
| Composes with | run rclone/S3/WebDAV server directly on the node; put Cloudflare in front of it and the fabric becomes the origin. This is the only path in the whole research where the origin has no provider and no byte bill. |
| Reliability | No redundancy on node disks by design; a single drive failure loses the blockstore, and the whole volume is destroyed at experiment termination. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 6
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-21 | docs.cloudlab.us/hardware.html | c240g1 = 5 nodes, Haswell 16 core, 128GB RAM, two 480GB SATA SSD + 'Twelve 3 TB HDDs donated by Seagate'; c240g2 = 3 nodes with four 3TB HDDs |
| 2026-10-21 | docs.cloudlab.us/advanced-storage.html | storage table: 'Per-node local blockstore | No [persistent] | 90GB to 40TB | 100-1000MB/sec | When up to 40TB is needed; specified by size in profile, system picks the node type' |
| 2026-10-21 | docs.cloudlab.us/basic-concepts.html | 'All experiments have an expiration time. By default, the expiration time is short (a few hours)' and longer extensions 'require the intervention of CloudLab staff' |
| 2026-10-21 | www.cloudlab.us/aup.php | litmus test is intent to publish in scholarly venues |
| 2026-10-21 | docs.emulab.net/ | the parent facility shares the account: 'Emulab is a public facility, available without charge to most researchers worldwide' |
| 2026-10-21 | docs.emulab.net/users.html | 'We therefore require that project leaders be faculty, senior research staff, or others who are relatively senior positions' |
More fields 1
| dead end | {"failure_class": "quota","why": "c240g1 node type = 12 x 3 TB HDDs (36 TB raw) on 5 nodes at Wisconsin; the storage table prices a 'per-node local blockstore' at 90GB-40TB, so a multi-TB blockstore is requestable by size in the profile and the system picks a node type","retry_when": null,"first_recorded": "2026-10-21"} |
|---|
Unknown values 3
- per object cap notes: the field may be stated in a source that was not read
- per object cap stated: the field may be stated in a source that was not read
- retention notes: the field may be stated in a source that was not read
- Free allowance
- Up to 10 TB per persistent remote dataset; pool is 500 TB at Utah, 160 TB at Wisconsin, 40 TB at Clemson.
- Verdict
- fails: identitythe identity required is not reachable without it
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- institutionno card, no phone
- Binding limit
- noneno named constraint binds
- Evidence
- reported2 sources; a third party said so
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-05checked 2026-10-21 (inherited); stale on 2026-11-05
| Free tier | up to 10 TB per persistent remote dataset; pool is 500 TB at Utah, 160 TB at Wisconsin, 40 TB at Clemson. Anything over 1 TB 'likely to require administrative approval'; long-term datasets are 'subject to per-project quotas for total size and might require interaction with CloudLab staff' unit TB; metered on unstated |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits | 10 TB hard ceiling per dataset, so 20 TiB needs two datasets and two projects' worth of quota. >1 TB needs a human to approve. Simultaneous read-write sharing across nodes 'will almost certainly wind up with a corrupted dataset'. No off-site backup; RAID/ZFS on the storage server only. |
| Identity | institution institution |
| Egress | free; mounted as /dev/sdb via iSCSI on the experiment network, 50-200 MB/s |
| Per-object cap | 10 TB hard ceiling per (10000000000000 bytes) |
| Retention | not stated |
| Interface | unknown block device -> any filesystem -> any server you run on the node |
| Tooling | portal 'Create Dataset' UI, RemoteBlockstore in RSpec, rwclone/readonly mapping for multi-node |
| Composes with | persistent dataset + one node running S3/WebDAV + Cloudflare in front = 10 TB of genuinely durable-by-dint-of-not-being-wiped storage at $0 |
| Reliability | Storage servers have RAID/ZFS but 'most clusters do not have off-site backup of user data'; a project expiry deletes the allocation. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 2
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-21 | docs.cloudlab.us/advanced-storage.html | 'Persistent remote datasets ... Capacity: up to 10TB'; 'sizes in excess of 1TB are likely to require administrative approval'; 'long-term datasets ... subject to per-project quotas for total size and might require interaction with CloudLab staff' |
| 2026-10-21 | docs.cloudlab.us/hardware.html | 'The Utah Cloudlab cluster includes a storage server for remote datasets. The server currently has 500TB available for allocation'; Wisconsin 160TB; Clemson 40TB |
More fields 1
| dead end | {"failure_class": "write-gated","why": "up to 10 TB per persistent remote dataset; pool is 500 TB at Utah, 160 TB at Wisconsin, 40 TB at Clemson. Anything over 1 TB 'likely to require administrative approval'; long-term datasets are 'subject to per-project quotas for total size and might require interaction with CloudLab staff'","retry_when": null,"first_recorded": "2026-10-21"} |
|---|
Unknown values 4
- interface: the access interface was not established
- per object cap notes: the field may be stated in a source that was not read
- retention notes: the field may be stated in a source that was not read
- retention stated: the field may be stated in a source that was not read