Hello CryoSPARC team,
Firstly, thank you for all that your team does to enable structural biologists to do our work.
Second, I have a bit of a conundrum. I work as the cryoEM facility manager for my university and have built central storage and several compute nodes that are used as workers for our CryoSPARC instance. Recently, we have been approached by some faculty requesting that we share our compute bandwidth (which seems reasonable – based on the economic climate and cost of compute hardware, presently). With this said, I have not found a way (and I have combed the forums) to set file system limitations for specific users within an instance.
The theory/suggestion I have, coming from a bit of this background, would be that during account setup the instance admin would set up parent data directory access for each of the users within their instance. I.e. if Jim Halpert AKA “Jimothy” was given an account on my instance, I (the admin) would then go into the Admin → User Management area of my instance and set their parent directory, so that they could only see that portion of the file system. E.g. If the parent data directory for the instance as a whole is /stor1pool/stor1/data/, with user directories housed within “data”, then I would allow each user to only access /stor1pool/stor1/data/jimothy.
This issue has been referenced over a few forum posts dating back to 2023 and 2024 with the only suggestions being to make multiple CryoSPARC instances, which do require some compute capability themselves for each master node, significantly increasing the amount of backend management from the administrative side. This is not a tractable solution and I think a decent amount of users may benefit from such an addition.
Again, thank you for everything you do and please keep this idea in consideration.