General Support Policies for HPC

HPC users and potential users are encouraged to contact IT help desk X2910 for questions or support requests.

HPC is mainly a faculty research facility, and may be used by students doing research projects or course work. MDRPS and TIS Linux group at OIT provide one-on-one research computing consultation only for faculty. Graduate students doing long-term research projects with faculty can get consultation service on a case by case basis. Undergraduate students using HPC to complete course work or small research project should expect to complete their project/work independently and no one-on-one consultation is available. Upon the request of faculty, OIT staff can provide quick user training for classes using HPC.

Install Additional Research Software

HPC is installed with compilers, libraries and software to meet the general needs of research computing. To install additional software on HPC, if the software is a small package and you aren’t collaborating with other users that need the same software, we recommend that you attempt to install the software into your own home directory; if multiple users need access to the software or if it needs to be installed at the system level, please create a ticket in the “research computing queue” that includes a url to the installation instructions for the requested software, or contact OIT help desk calling X2910 with your specific request.

File Backup

Files under home directories of user accounts will be backed up on obsidian backup partition. Files under project accounts will not be backed up. It is the user's own responsibility to backup results and data under project account.

Disk Quota

Faculty and research staff account has 1TB of disk quota, and student account has 10GB of disk quota. If more disk space is needed, please contact OIT help desk to request for a project account. A project account is shared by faculty, research staff, and students collaborating on research projects, and can have 5TB of disk quota by default.

Disk Quota Extension Request

Faculty may request disk quota increment of a project account for up to 20 TB and four weeks, and accommodation of disk quota increment would only be made once every six months. Increment of project disk quota above 20TB needs to be approved on a case by case basis.

Local Disk Space on Computing Nodes

Each computing node on obsidian cluster has only 1TB hard drive. Users should not save files on local hard drive unless absolutely necessary for a short period of time. Instead, save your files under your home directory on the head node. User files saved on local hard drive will be purged without prior notice if the system administrator finds it necessary.

If your computation involves large amount of file transfer between nodes, you may use IPoIB feature of the cluster for fast file transfer. See Submit & Run Jobs for details.