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Motivation and Timeline

Due to recent changes in Anaconda's Terms of Service, the VACC can no longer provide or support the use of Anaconda, Miniconda, or any of the Anaconda licensed channels on the VACC cluster and still comply with the new license terms.

In alignment with decisions made by HPC centers at other academic and research institutions, the VACC is requiring a transition from the use of Anaconda or Miniconda to Miniforge. Licensed Anaconda channels (e.g., defaults) shall not be used, except for instructional purposes, and only when a package cannot otherwise be obtained. The conda-forge channel should be used instead.

Issues with New Anaconda License Terms on the VACC

Over the past year, the terms of service for Academic licenses, both personal and institutional, have been ambiguous, conflicting, and fluid. One of the main issues for the VACC, as an HPC center, is that while there is a stated exception to scaled deployment restrictions for academic institutions, the exemption is for educational use only. With so many research projects taking advantage of VACC resources, we cannot guarantee compliance for a central installation. Additionally, restrictions on third-party access are problematic, since there are many external collaborators on the VACC.

Furthermore, when using Anaconda or Miniconda, the first channel searched when downloading or updating packages, by default, is the licensed Anaconda defaults channel. It's terms of use are restricted and may require a paid license, while the conda-forge channel is free for all to use. Using the Anaconda licensed channels for research without a paid license will likely violate Anaconda's Academic license terms. At the time of this writing, package installation from licensed channels is still allowed for instructional use according to Anaconda's Academic Policy in addition to the Academic End User License Agreement (EULA) which you must agree to when signing up for academic access.

ACTION REQUIRED

See the Technical Details page for important information on actions you need to take for the transition.

Schedule of Important Changes

There will be changes coming on May 15th that may break existing conda environments. Attending to the following points as soon as you can will help insure that you are ready for those changes.

  • Use miniforge module (or personal Miniforge installation) when creating new Python environments
  • Check for Anaconda repository dependencies in all current environments and reinstall as needed
  • Reinstall all environments created with venv by May 15th
  • Update scripts to load the miniforge module instead of python3.xx-anaconda
  • All python3.xx-anaconda modules (e.g., python3.10-anaconda) will instead load miniforge
  • Open OnDemand JupyterLab and Jupyter Notebook apps will use only Miniforge
  • Virtual environments created with venv should all have been reinstalled
  • Anaconda modules will be removed from the VACC
  • All scripts previously loading Anaconda modules should use miniforgeinstead
  • Environments found to have used a licensed Anaconda channel should have been reinstalled without said channel(s) or an appropriate license should have been obtained by the user
About Miniforge

Miniforge, a conda-forge distribution, provides conda and mamba pre-configured to use conda-forge as the default, and only, channel. It can be configured to use additional channels (e.g., bioconda), when needed. Miniforge also includes pip and venv, alternate tools for installing packages and managing environments. It has a reduced number of packages in the base environment compared to Anaconda.

Post Transition

After the scheduled transition period, any virtual environments created with venv that have not been reinstalled with miniforge will no longer work, and any scripts that have not been updated to load the miniforge module instead of python3.xx-anaconda will fail. Conda environments that utilized restricted Anaconda channels should have been reinstalled without license-controlled channels.

If you decide to use Anaconda or Miniconda locally installed with any licensed Anaconda channel(s) or to explicitly add the defaults channel (or any other licensed Anaconda channels) when using Miniforge for anything other than instructional use, it is your responsibility to obtain the correct license, to know and understand the license agreement (EULA), and to abide by those terms. The VACC will not support new or continued use of local Anaconda or Miniconda installations. In these cases, both installation and module set up must be done by the licensed person.

If you have any questions about the transition, please open a ticket with VACC support by emailing vacchelp@uvm.edu or visit us at one of our Research Computing Virtual Café sessions.