Countdown to Data Preview 1.0
data.lsst.cloud offline Friday June 27th
You will have seen the announcement that Data Preview 1, our preview release containing images from the LSST Commissioning Camera, is scheduled to be released on June 30th. In order to prepare the Rubin Science Platform for this very first release of data taken with the Simonyi Survey Telescope 
, data.lsst.cloud will be unavailable starting Friday June 27th, coming back online on Monday June 30th for the DP1 release.
User tokens to be invalidated
As part of the DP1 release work, existing user tokens will be invalidated. This means if you are an existing user who had created a security token (for example to access the TAP service from outside the platform), you will have to create a new one after data.lsst.cloud comes back on line. Apologies for the inconvenience; this will not be the case for official Data Releases (DR1 onwards).
Heads-up: quotas are coming
As we prepare data.lsst.cloud for the DP1 release, some inevitable news: quotas are coming to the notebook filesystems.
DP0 (our simulated data preview) was a relatively small engagement pilot; with DP1 (LSST ComCam data) and even more with DP2 (LSSTCam data) we are ramping up the RSP for our 10,000 estimated data rights holders. This means putting in controls to ensure RSP resources are fairly distributed among all users.
Starting with the DP1 release, /home spaces will have a quota of 35 GB; the majority of existing users are already well within that allocation. If you are over this quota, you will still be able to log onto the notebook aspect but you will be unable to write any more files until you have cleared enough space to get under the quota.
The handful of users who are currently exceeding the soon-to-be-applied quota will receive a courtesy notification via e-mail soon.
Heads-up: scratch space purging is coming
Scratch space can serve as a temporary “relief valve” by allowing you to perform operations with large intermediate files that would temporarily put your home directory over quota.
Starting with the DP1 release, scratch space will remain without quotas but will be cleared out weekly. In order to make this obvious, the filesystem currently known as /scratch will be renamed /deleted-sundays. If you are working on scratch space, copy key results to your home space to retain them long-term.
Quotas, purge policies and API limits will be adjusted as necessary in the coming months and years to be as lenient as possible while safeguarding resources for all users.
Would you only have one key to your house?
No you would not! So why have only one identity linked with your RSP account?
Since you use your institutional credentials to access the Rubin Science Platform, it means RSP staff cannot help you with account access issues. If, when you signed up for an RSP account, you used your University of Ruritania credentials, when you leave for another job you will lose access to your RSP account and any work you did.
To prevent such an unfortunate event, make sure you have a second identity linked with your RSP account, ideally with an identity provider not tied to your employment (eg. Github, ORCID). Follow the documentation here: Linking additional identities — Rubin Science Platform
Note: users creating an RSP account for the first time should preferably use their primary institutional identity, as that helps us to establish your data rights. Once your account is approved, you can go ahead and link additional identities, whatever they happen to be.
Latest Updates
“Medium” option removed from Notebook aspect
To reduce confusion, the “Medium” container size option has been removed from the Notebook aspect. “Large” size (currently 4 core 16 GB RAM) is the default and should be used for data processing tasks. The “Small” instance remains available for quick tasks such as file operations.