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OSPool

osg-htc.org/services/ospool/Cloud VMcompute/ospoolJSONcomparereport an errorprovider JSON

Free allowance
"The OSPool is a source of computing capacity that is accessible to any researcher affiliated with a US academic institution." The page reports one day of operation as 831K jobs completed, placed by 56 research projects, consuming 844K core hours, from capacity contributed by 68 institutions.
Verdict
fails: identitythe identity required is not reachable without it
Cost
free tier
Identity
institutionno card, no phone
Binding limit
write-gatedEligibility is an affiliation with a US-based academic, government or non-profit institution or project; an unaffiliated person cannot obtain a full OSPool account, and the guest notebook is the only route that does not ask for one.
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"The OSPool is a source of computing capacity that is accessible to any researcher affiliated with a US academic institution." The page reports one day of operation as 831K jobs completed, placed by 56 research projects, consuming 844K core hours, from capacity contributed by 68 institutions. The documented ideal job is 1 CPU per job, under 10 hours walltime, a few GB of RAM, 1 GPU per job, with expected throughput of "1000s concurrent cores" per user.
unit hours; metered on wall-clock; opportunistic-throughput
Pricenone stated
Limits
  • write-gated (binding) Eligibility is an affiliation with a US-based academic, government or non-profit institution or project; an unaffiliated person cannot obtain a full OSPool account, and the guest notebook is the only route that does not ask for one. source
Identityinstitution not published
Egressnot stated
Interfacerest inferred from the tooling the provider documents; not probed
Toolingnot stated
Composes withThe guest notebook is the only part reachable without an affiliation, and it composes into a benchmark: it submits real HTCondor jobs, so a full 844K-core-hour pool can be measured on a handful of jobs before any affiliation exists, but the capacity beyond that stays behind the institutional door.
Reliabilityno reliability event recorded
NotesThree routes exist for an unaffiliated user. (1) A full OSPool account via the OSG Portal is closed to them by the eligibility sentence above. (2) The OSPool guest notebook, which the documentation says needs no account and accepts Google or Microsoft sign-in, so this is a real trial route with an email-level identity and is the one route that would move this record to a reachable verdict. (3) Joining somebody else's project, which requires that project's PI to add the user and therefore does not remove the affiliation requirement. The throughput numbers are the page's own counters for one day and are not a quota; no per-user allocation limit is published anywhere read, which is why binding is recorded as the eligibility gate rather than a request rate.
Parsed numbers
  • has-free-tier 1
Evidence 5
datesourcewhat it proved
2026-10-22osg-htc.org/services/ospool/"The OSPool is a source of computing capacity that is accessible to any researcher affiliated with a US academic institution", quoted
2026-10-22osg-htc.org/services/ospool/daily totals for 21 October: 831K jobs, 56 projects, 12M file transfers, 844K core hours, 68 institutions, quoted from the page counters
2026-10-22osg-htc.org/services/ospool/ideal job table: 1000s concurrent cores per user, CPU 1 per job, walltime under 10 hours, RAM under a few GB, GPU 1 per job, quoted
2026-10-22osg-htc.org/services/ospool/"The OSPool is made up of mostly opportunistic capacity - contributing clusters may interrupt jobs at any time", quoted
2026-10-22portal.osg-htc.org/documentation/overview/test-drive-ospool/"You can do so with an OSPool notebook - and you don't even need an account!"; the sign-in step offers Google or Microsoft when the institution is not listed, quoted
More fields 1
facets{"class": "open-science-grid","free_tier_kind": "opportunistic-throughput","shape": {"vcpu": null,"ram_gib": null,"gpu_class": null,"gpu_count": 1}}
Unknown values 6
  • egress metered: egress metering was not published
  • egress terms: a source was read and is silent on this field
  • 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