High Performance Computing

November 7, 2009

Background:

Students, faculty, and staff at the University of Kentucky and at other public universities in the Commonwealth (subject to certain conditions) may be eligible for accounts on selected HPC facilities.

Policies and Procedures:

All users of University of Kentucky Computing and Communications facilities are expected to abide by all relevant policies and procedures. For more information, please see the UK Information Systems Policies document. In particular, accounts are granted to one person only and no other person may use the account. No exceptions will be made. Failure to abide by these policies may result in the suspension of computing privileges.

If your account becomes inaccessible, please contact User Account Services by email (accounts@lsv.uky.edu) or by phone (859-257-1300). Ask if the account has been suspended or disabled for any reason. If an account actually has been suspended, then send email to the support team ( help-hpc@uky.edu ) for more information.

Login procedures:

For security reasons, interactive logins to the cluster will be by secure-shell (SSH) only. See this page for more information.

Submitting Jobs:

The batch system must be used for all jobs. Non-batch jobs on any node may be canceled, unless special permission has been obtained in advance from a system administrator ( help-hpc@uky.edu ).

User processes on the compile/login nodes that interfere with optimal service may be canceled without notice.

Please checkpoint long running jobs, if possible!

Files in the temporary disk areas (/scratch) are not backed up and may be deleted without warning, if necessary, to provide proper service.

When the computing resources are near exhaustion, restrictions may be tightened; the ultimate goal of the policy is to give all researchers access to a fair share of the computing resources.

Account Termination:

After an account is terminated for any reason, the data associated with it will be retained for one year.

It is the researcher's responsibility to copy or transfer any data that must be kept past this period.

Please contact technical support ( help-hpc@uky.edu ) for help, if necessary.

Help and FAQ's:

For most problems, please consult the web pages at hpc.uky.edu first. In particular, the Frequently Asked Questions page may be useful.

Next try email to the technical support group ( help-hpc@uky.edu ). Please avoid calling or emailing individuals directly. Email to the help address will generally be answered more quickly.