The TAO platform was designed and built to be a multi-user platform. Therefore, one of its basic features relates to the user management.
User can authenticate to the platform by several configurable mechanisms (local user base, LDAP or even single sign-on). User accounts can be linked to groups with appropriate system rights.
Since many years, EO Data and EO Data processing as well, use increasingly disk space and computing power. Even if technical infrastructures evolve likewise, computing and storage resources have a not negligible provisioning and usage cost. Therefore, we have to limit resource usage in order to offer a fair operation of the platform.
The platform, through its Authorization module, defines quota management by user. The quota consists in the pool of resources that may be allocated for a single user, in terms of: number of CPUs, storage space and, possibly, RAM memory amount for the execution of user workflows.
A dedicated activity monitoring service captures the required information and collects it in a database. This database with tracked processing activity and disk space consumption is used then to automatically restrict the access to resources according to the user quota.