HPC etiquette

Use as few resources as possible. The cluster is needed by dozens of university members!

Check the performance and scalability of your programs. The parallel efficiency should not be less than 0.5 to avoid wasting resources unnecessarily.

Use the -nice option if you submit many individual jobs at once (man sbatch).

Use array jobs for a large number of small jobs; with a limit on the number of concurrent jobs (-tc).

Limit the requested memory (#SBATCH -mem 120000).

No Pre-/Postprocessing in the main queues! For interactive work, the short queue is available.

Your scratch folder should be the working directory and contain most of the data. A lot of disk space and read/write capacity is available there. The home folder, however, is reserved for quick-access configuration files.

SLURM scripts should be located in the home directory and should be submitted from there

Release unused nodes when your work is complete.

Remove unnecessary files.

Do not leave any zombie programs behind.

No backups of your Neumann data is carried out automatically: backup your results and critical files to your own computer.

Administrators may delete old files if they deem it necessary.

The login node controls the entire cluster, including SLURM which runs jobs and the queues.

For any resource-intensive task (computing, heavy data processing, interactive sessions etc.), reserve a node with an sbatch script.

Do not share your password with anyone

Never request the passwords of other users (colleagues, students etc.)

Each person using Neumann should have their own username: this enhances security and resource attribution. Contact the administrator every time a new person is to use Neumann.