Usage

Posted Tue, 2009-02-10 15:23

CPU

Usage is limited to academic activities. Do not play games or transfer entertainment media using the HPC linux cluster.

User shall not overuse the HPC linux cluster. In order to support that, here are a few policies about computer usage in the HPC linux cluster.

  • Run no more than one CPU intensive process on each workstation.

  • Use less than one third of available license tokens for any given piece of license-limited software. For example, we have 10 licenses available for Matlab, so use three or less licenses simultaneously. (License information for software can be found on the License Status page.)

  • In times when a significant number of users (more than 3) are trying to access one piece of license-limited software, use only one license token for that piece of sofware. For example, if the License Status page shows that 5 people are trying to access Matlab, only run one copy of Matlab. (The License Status page cannot show how many people are trying to acquire license tokens.)

Disk Space

Users should use less than 5G on the HPC. Users who need more space should introduce themselves to the current HPC system admin and explain why they will need more space.

Each machine has a 64G /scratch partition on it for temporary user storage. Users should create a directory with their username in /scratch and use this space for running processes instead of the home directories. The local drive access will be 100 to 1000 times faster than the network drive. The results of any process should be copied back to the user's home directory of course, because the contents of the /scratch directory are only available on the local machine and the /scratch directory will be erased on a reboot.