Skip to content

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 has transitioned 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 FOR CONDA/VENV USERS

See the Technical Details page for important information on actions you may need to take, if you haven't already.

Transition History

  • Anaconda software has been removed from the VACC
  • All scripts previously loading Anaconda modules should use miniforgeinstead
  • Environments that used a licensed channel should have been reinstalled without said channel(s) or user must have a license
  • Environments created with venv using Anaconda should have been reinstalled with Miniforge
  • All python3.xx-anaconda modules (e.g., python3.10-anaconda) redirect miniforge
  • Open OnDemand JupyterLab and Jupyter Notebook apps only use Miniforge

VACC users were notified of upcoming changes and informed that these changes may break existing conda environments if not addressed by the user.

  • Use miniforge module (or personal Miniforge) 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 20th
  • Update scripts to load the miniforge module instead of python3.xx-anaconda
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. The conda package and environment tool provided by Miniforge is the same as that provided by Anaconda/Miniconda and can be used with the same commands. 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

Now that the VACC has fully transitioned to the use of Miniforge, 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.