General Policies

Ethical Guidelines

 All users must follow the Supercomputing Institute's ethical guidelines. In particular, passwords must NOT be shared with anyone. Every individual with access to the facility should have his/her own user account and password.

Privacy

 The default file permissions for the new user is read/write only by the user, but this may be changed. A principal investigator has the right to access data and files in his/her research group. In the event that the P.I. has difficulty doing this, he or she may contact the Research Programs Administrator or the Head of Technical Support.

Technical support staff do not read a user's email or files or alter them without the user's permission except in cases of emergency and only within the scope of administrative responsibilities.

Job Scheduling

All large jobs on the IBM Power4 supercomputer must be submitted through LoadLeveler (the queuing system). Large jobs are not permitted on interactive/development nodes because such jobs will disrupt others development work and other services provided by interactive/development nodes. Although users are welcome to test their code, anything running for longer than the interactive time limits (listed below) must be submitted to the queueing system.

For instructions and examples on how to use LoadLeveler (the queuing system), please view the LoadLeveler World Wide Web pages.

The following limits on the interactive nodes have been instituted on a trial basis. If these limits put difficult constraints on your work, please let us know by sending email to help@msi.umn.edu, calling 626-0802, or filling out and submitting the online help form.

Do not not request not_shared node usage for interactive jobs.

Serial Jobs
 30 minutes

Parallel Jobs
 1 node up to 4 processors: 30 minutes

Disk Quota

Each user is given an initial quota of 5 GB on their home directory. If more space is needed, please send email to help@msi.umn.edu.

Please remember that disk space is not unlimited, and please eliminate files that are not necessary.

Temporary Disk Space

There are various /scratch filesystems available for use. These filesystems exist for job outpout and are not backed up. It is suggested that all job output go to /scratch filesystems rather than your home directory. After your job runs, we suggest you move the data you need to your home directory. The /scratch filesystems are cleaned regularly and should not be used for long-term data storage: Files not modified for 14 days will be automatically deleted. The program "touch" will not change the deletion date. Contact help@msi.umn.edu if you need files saved in the scratch file systems for more than 14 days.

There is also a 50 GB quota on scratch space. If you need more, please contact help@msi.umn.edu.

Temporary disk space (/usr/tmp and /scratch filesystems) is not backed up by technical support staff.

Cross-Mounting File Systems

 A policy on mounting filesystems from other departments has not yet been determined.

We will not, at this time, export our filesystems to other departments.