3. Acceptable use

Cluster is a shared resource, at any given time there can be hundreds users and thousands of jobs running. What you do can have dramatic effects on others.

Access to all RCIC managed resources is subject to our Acceptable Use Policy. Please read and abide by it.

Important

Violations of this policy or any other applicable University policies may result in the temporary or permanent removal of accounts associated with research computing.

To avoid problems, please follow simple rules of conduct described below.

3.1. Simple conduct

• All jobs, batch or interactive must be submitted to the Slurm scheduler

• Login nodes are meant only for:

  1. light editing

  2. very short compilation (under a few minutes and using one thread)

  3. submitting jobs

  Do not run on login node:

  • any computational jobs

  • any job that runs for more than 1hr or is using significant memory and CPU

  • any compilation that asks for multiple threads while running make (for example make -j 8)

  • any conda or R installation of packages or environments

  • any downloads of packages, data, large files that exceed a few Gb.

  The above (and additional similar) processes need to be submitted to the Slurm scheduler as interactive or batch jobs.

  Warning

  Long-running jobs will be removed from login nodes without notice

  We reserve the right to limit access for the users who abuse the system

• Ssh access to the compute nodes is turned off to prevent users from starting jobs bypassing Slurm. See Attach to a job.

• Do not run Slurm jobs in your $HOME. Instead, use your DFS storage /pub/ucinetid.

• Check your disk quota frequently. File system limits are generally the first ones that will negatively affect your job. See HOME, DFS and CRSP pages for information about quotas.

3.2. Special cases

3.2.1. MobaXterm monitoring

MobaXterm users DO NOT enable remote server monitoring!

Remote server monitoring is an experimental feature of MobaXterm that runs unnecessary multiple processes on login node under your account. These processes add to the overall load on the cluster. None of the information they collect you can use in any way for your work on the cluster.

Do check the lower portion of your MobaXterm window to verify that your monitoring is disabled. See figures below for a reference:

Fig. 3.1 Monitoring enabled - WRONG!

Fig. 3.2 Monitoring disabled - correct!