The AVIDD-B Cluster

Usage Policies

Accounts

Access to AVIDD-B is provided to all IU faculty and their sponsored graduate students and staff. Instructional use is limited to courses which have been approved by the Director for Research and Academic Computing.

Passwords

Your account password on the AVIDD-B Cluster is your IU Network ID password. Account passwords are intended for the owner of the account only and should not be shared with others. If a password is determined to be insecure, the account will be temporarily disabled. Passwords may be changed using the IU Password Maintenance page. Account passwords for the AVIDD-B Cluster will not be given out via email or by telephone.

Home directories

Home directories reside on the EMC storage system and have a default quota of 1GB. Note that this space is shared with any files you may have in your Libra Cluster and Research Database Complex accounts. If additional permanent storage space is required, users should apply for a Mass Store account.

Login and File Transfer Access

Login and file transfer access will be limited to the designated interactive nodes via Secure Shell Version 2 clients and commands (ssh, scp, sftp). Telnet and ftp are not supported for security reasons. To transfer files to and from the Mass Store, use pftp (Kerberized parallel ftp) and hsi (Hierarchical Storage Interface).

CPU Limits and Batch Jobs

Interactive and backgrounded jobs are limited to 20 minutes of CPU time. Interactive and backgrounded jobs exceeding this limit are automatically terminated with no warning. Jobs requiring more than 20 minutes of CPU must be submitted as batch jobs to the PBS batch queueing system via the qsub command.

Computational Resources

AVIDD-B default job policies:

  • Default walltime: 2 hours
  • Maximum walltime: 816 hours (34 days)
  • Maximum running or idle jobs: 64
  • Maximum processors: 128
  • Maui fairshare target: 20%

Mail Usage

We do not provide a production mail service on the AVIDD clusters, however PBS communicates via e-mail. Mail forwarding should be configured during account creation, but if you are receiving mail on the AVIDD clusters, you may need to set up a .forward file for your account; see this Knowledge Base Document for more information.

If you do leave email on the AVIDD clusters, it may be purged. Twice per month /var/spool/mail is checked for mail files larger than 100KB. If a file is larger than that size it is moved to /scr/mail. You may have up to two old mail files in /scr/mail. After a mail file is 30 days old it will be purged from /scr/mail.

Scheduled Downtime

The AVIDD-B maintenance window will be scheduled for the first Tuesday of each month. A window will only be used if necessary; an announcement regarding the status of maintenance will be posted the preceding Friday morning in both the AVIDD Message of the Day and on the Scheduled Downtime page.

Please note: AVIDD maintenance policy allows for monthly outages, but PBS queue limits are 34 days AVIDD-B. If you need to run a job for more than 672 hours (28 days), please contact the administrators prior to submitting it. All possible efforts will be made to prevent jobs from being terminated during maintenance outages.

Software Requests

Users wishing to use other public domain or commercial packages may request the installation on publicly accessible disk space by filling out the Request for Software Installation on Research Systems.

Questions and Comments

The policies described in this document were established with the goal of providing a stable, powerful and efficient research computing environment for IU faculty, graduate students, and staff. If you have any questions or comments about these policies, we welcome your input. Please contact the High Performance Systems group, hps-admin@iu.edu.