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Workspaces

Access to FLAME is organized around workspaces. A workspace is a shared space that groups you with your collaborators and controls your access to resources (storage, GPUs, etc.). Everything you do on FLAME happens within a workspace.

Each research group can, and typically should have multiple research workspaces. If you have different subgroups working with different datasets, or different grants/funding sources over time, you can and should organize these into multiple workspaces.

As a PI, you can have as many workspaces as you want, and add your group members to as many of them as they need to be in.

Groups

Workspaces are further organized into groups, which are sets of workspaces run by the same PI. For the most part, you don't need to think about groups, they mostly exist for resource sharing reasons. Limits on resources and fairsharing policies are set at the group, rather than workspace level, so that a PI doesn't get more resources just for having more workspaces.

What a workspace gives you

When a workspace is created, FLAME automatically provisions:

  • A namespace: an isolated area on the Kubernetes cluster where your workloads run
  • Personal storage for each member: each workspace member gets a 100GB "home PVC", which is mounted automatically in notebooks and jobs
  • Shared storage: 1 TB of shared storage for the whole workspace team, also mounted automatically
  • Code and container hosting -- a space for your workspace's code repositories and container images on the cluster's internal Forgejo instance

See Storage for more details on how storage works.

Roles

Each workspace member has one of three roles:

Role Can do
Owner Manage workspace membership, submit workloads, read/write shared storage. Typically the PI.
Member Submit workloads, read/write shared storage. Most people in a workspace will be members.
Viewer Read-only access to all resources. Rarely used, perhaps for collaborators who just need to see experiment results but not run them.

Getting access to a workspace

Workspaces are created and managed by URCF staff. To request a new workspace, to find out what workspaces you're a member of, or to be added to an existing workspace, email urcf-support@drexel.edu.