1.1  :  Registration

To register for an account allowing access to the protected part of the Virgo database please send an email to j.c.helly at durham.ac.uk. Please provide us with some information about you, especially about your affiliation and your intended use. If you need access to specific lightcones for GAMA, Euclid and/or DESI surveys, please also cc peder.norberg at durham.ac.uk in your registration e-mail indicating which survey you intend to work with, so that we can grant access to the relevant lightcone product.

The reasons we protect the main database from public access are various. First is simply a question of resources. It is very easy for users, even if experienced ones, to submit queries that use up all the resources of the database server for a long time. This is especially true for the main database, which is about 512 times larger than the milli-Millennium database to which the public site gives access.
For this same reason we have as yet not set up an automated registration mechanism. On the one hand we want to prevent the other users from frivolous usage by some, which is why we would like some indication of affiliation. But we also hope to gain experience with the usage patterns by external users not directed associated to the Virgo project. This may allow us to tune the database to those potentially very different requests.