User Account Policy

Introduction

The philosophy of the UFS HPC towards usage of the HPC infrastructure by researchers can be sumarized in our aims as a unit:

  • To provide researchers with the freedom necessary to innovate
  • To provide researchers equitable access to the UFS HPC resources
  • To remove the technical IT burden from research computing
  • To foster a healthy research computing community that can facilitate inter-disciplinary research collaborations.

While we want to shield researchers from the burdens of bureaucratic micromanagement as much as possible, some rules and guidelines are necessary to ensure that we can reach our aims of empowering our researchers.

Definitions

  • User account credentials : UFS HPC User name and password which provide access to the UFS HPC infrastructure

Account Credentials

  1. Users are expected to use a password of sufficient strength to protect against unauthorized access to their accounts.
  2. Users are not allowed to share their user account credentials with any other party.

Software Licenses

  1. Users must at all times adhere to the terms of any software which they use on the UFS HPC. This is especially true of proprietary software, which, for example, often prohibits one from granting access to non-license holding parties.
  2. The UFS HPC cannot be held liable for users breaking the terms and conditions of software which they use.

Resource usage

  1. Users are expected to use the resources of the UFS HPC responsibly.
  2. Over-assigning resources is strictly prohibited. For example: Assigning two GPU's for a job that only utilizes one.
  3. Use of UFS HPC resources are restricted to research purposes only. Using resources for other purposes, such as crypto-currency mining is strictly prohibited.

Storage

  1. The UFS HPC provides its users with more storage than many other HPC units. Thus it is important that users use this concession sparingly.
  2. Only store research data on the UFS HPC - making personal backups of non-research related data is prohibited.
  3. Please note that we create multiple backups of the user home directories, thus creating extra copies of data should be avoided.
  4. User's are requested to keep their home and scratch directories as small as possible by regularly deleting temporary files and only keeping relevant output data.

Community

  1. From time to time, a researcher may require additional resources (for example: a Reviewer requested an additional experiment for a submitted publication). In such cases the UFS HPC staff may request that a job from another user be stopped to free up resources. It is requested that users respond positively (if possible) to such request, as this fosters a healthy, collaborative research community. Please note: In such cases, a job will only be stopped if the job owner provides consent to do so.