Instances in Nightingale OS
After you create a project, the next thing you do in Nightingale OS is create one or more instances.
An instance is only a hardware specification. Your data gets mounted in any instance you create. Whether you create one or many instances is only a matter of preferences. When you need different sizes for different stages of your research, it's usually more convenient to create a new instance with a new size instead of changing the size of a given instance.
The CPU and memory that you see listed for a given instance size are guaranteed minimums. When there is less contention between platform users, you'll get better than listed performance. GPUs are different—they are fixed allocations.
You can run more than one instance at a time.
Free instances automatically stop after 30 minutes of inactivity.
Paid instances need to be shut down manually. You can use the
ngsci package to do this for you.