Recent Updates to Fornax Science Console and Welcoming External Beta Users

Announcements
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The Fornax Science Console is now welcoming beta users from the broader astronomical community - in this first phase, we are focusing on researchers, but will eventually open to students and the broader public. If you know colleagues who might be interested, please share this link from our homepage: The Fornax Initiative Welcomes Beta Users

In preparation for this new phase, several updates have been installed on the Fornax Science Console in the past few weeks:

  1. Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is now required for every Science Console login. See Log In - Fornax Quick Start Guide for more information.

  2. The “timeout” period for login to the Science Console has been extended to 24 hours. 24 hours after you login, you will automatically be logged out of the Science Console. (Running JupyterLab sessions are not affected; see the session information section in the docs).

  3. Home Directory space is no longer “allocated” - you are charged for what you use. The dashboard used to show how much storage space you had been “allocated” - if you were given 100 GB to use, you were charged for 100, even if you only used 20. This is no longer the case. For more details, see: Data Storage - Fornax User Documentation.

  4. If you have a project that requires a large amount of storage space (e.g., 1 TB), please reach out to us by opening a topic in Helpdesk. We can make large amounts of storage available for a temporary period. See Private Temporary Storage in the Fornax docs.

  5. The Storage Dashboard now shows total private Storage in Use. It is the sum of the storage you are using in your home directory, your private s3-storage area, and any temporary storage you have.

  6. The “Support” area of the Fornax Forum has been renamed “Helpdesk", to make it easier for new users to tell where to ask questions.

  7. Julia and R environments have been added to the available Fornax Compute Environments - Fornax User Documentation. There have been several other recent updates to the compute environments - see the Latest science-environments topics in Announcements - Fornax Community Forum for further details.

We are excited to begin this broader beta period, and ask for your patience if response times or other services don’t respond as you expect. Please reach out to us via Helpdesk if you experience any problems, have questions or suggestions for improvement. We want to collaborate with you to meet your research needs in Fornax.