The above Develop-Submit-Review cycle (Sections 4.5.3, 4.5.4, 4.5.5) can be traversed as many times as necessary. However, at some point, you will have completed your specific unit of research work that prompted you to create this particular Experiment.
When you are confident that you will never use the Experiment again in its current form, we ask that you "retire" the experiment, so that we can purge the Experiment from our system, and free up resources such as storage, CPU, IP/VLAN/VPN namespace, etc. Before doing so, please remember to retrieve ALL of your data and code from your AVNs.
Retiring the Experiment can be done from the Portal, please see Section 4.7.4 for a walkthrough; you can also email AERPAW Ops for help.
If an Experiment is dormant for a significant period, we may conclude that it is in effect retired, and remove it from our system. We will always attempt to get in touch with you before finally doing so, but you may still end up losing work. Please be proactive in retrieving your data and code and cleaning up.
To "archive" the AVNs of your Experiment, you can use the "Save and Exit" feature (as in Step 8 above) to store AVN images from your Experiment on AERPAW itself. Please contact AERPAW Operations in order to arrange procedures for you to retrieve these AVN images; at this time, the Portal does not provide functionality for you to do this yourself.
In future, we hope to add the functionality of using such images to bootstrap subsequent experiments you create. Unfortunately, this capability is not yet available.