[Mathematica] Mathematica licenses and Mathematica Online (will resend in early January)

[Kelvin Raywood]

Happy Holidays Mathematica Users:

I will resend this message in early January so feel free to stop reading 
and delete it.    I'm sending it now while it's top of mind to me, and 
because some of you may want to think about this over the break.

The TRIUMF Mathematica shared-licenses and contract are up for 
renewal.   We generally negotiate a 3-year contract so it's important 
that we understand any plans or expectations that you have.    There is 
also budget pressure to reduce the number of shared licenses that TRIUMF 
purchases.   This is exacerbated by the poor exchange-rate between 
Canadian and US currency.

If you have any input on your usage of Mathematica, especially on the 
following topics, then please provide feedback in a reply to this 
message.   See *Reply-To Address* below.

  * Are you interested in using *Mathematica Online* (more info below)
    to replace some or all of your local usage of Mathematica?

  * Do you anticipate phasing out, or reducing your usage of Mathematica?

  * Could you reduce or replace your usage of Mathematica with something
    else, especially Jupyter or MATLAB?

*Reply-To Address**
*
A reply to this message will be sent to mathemtica-license [@] triumf.ca 
which is a shared mailbox used by IS&T.     Don't do Reply-All which 
will include the list address and my personal address.

*Mathematica License-Usage in 2024**
*
For the past dozen years or so, TRIUMF has purchased ten floating 
network-licenses which are accompanied by ten home-use licenses and 80 
licenses for cluster-computing.    The following shows the maximum 
number of in-use licenses each day of 2024 up to Dec 23. There was 
extremely-low usage of the cluster-computing licenses so I have not 
include usage graph of them.

There's a couple of things to note here:

  * We never reached the ten-license limit
  * We only went above six licenses on 58 out 358 days
  * There is always at least one, frequently more licenses used every
    day including weekends

The conclusion of the latter two points indicates that some people are 
probably leaving mathematica open on their workstations when not using it.

One possibility is to replace some of the Mathematica network-licenses 
with Mathematica-Online licenses.    This would reduce the number of 
static home-use licenses by the same amount, though there would be less 
need for them by users of Mathematica Online.   It would also reduce the 
number of  cluster-computing licenses by eight times the number of 
network-licenses that are replaced.    This would not be a significant 
loss given the historic use of the cluster-computing licenses.*
*

*Mathematica Online**
***
For a description see:

https://wolfram.com/mathematica/online
<https://wolfram.com/mathematica/online>
At the moment, I'm not sure of the amount of cloud-storage provided per 
user, but I think it's in the vicinity of 50GB. However, just like a 
local instance of Mathematica,  Mathematica Online includes built-in 
functionality for interacting with various external storage-systems, 
such as Amazon S3, or the Arbutus-Cloud storage provided by the Digital 
Research-Alliance of Canada; formerly Compute Canada.   The TRIUMF IS&T 
Research-Computing-Services team is also in planning a deployment of a 
storage system that will include an S3 interface.   We hope to have it 
available by late spring.

Thus, if you use Mathematica to analyse large files, such as experiment 
data or the output of a simulation, you could**store them in 
Arbutus-Cloud, or the TRIUMF storage, and use Mathematica Online for the 
analysis.*
*

*Reminder - Close Mathematica when you're not using it*

**When you start mathematica at TRIUMF, it requests a license from the 
license server, and periodically renews it.  When the license limit is 
reached, new requests will be denied.    So it is important to close 
Mathematica whenever you are not actively using it so that the license 
will be returned to the pool.

*Requesting Help*

For help with installing or upgrading Mathematica use the 
General-Support queue of TRIUMF helpdesk.   TRIUMF's license also 
includes technical-support from Wolfram but your email address must be 
registered.    You can request registration via the General-Support 
queue of helpdesk.
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