ARCHIVED: Big Red usage policies

This content has been archived, and is no longer maintained by Indiana University. Information here may no longer be accurate, and links may no longer be available or reliable.

Note: Big Red, originally commissioned in 2006, was retired from service on September 30, 2013. Its replacement, Big Red II, is a hybrid CPU/GPU Cray XE6/XK7 system capable of achieving a theoretical peak performance (Rpeak) of 1 petaFLOPS, making it one of the two fastest university-owned supercomputers in the US. For more, see ARCHIVED: Get started on Big Red II. If you have questions or concerns about the retirement of Big Red, contact the High Performance Systems group.

On this page:

Accounts

Access to Big Red is provided to all Indiana University faculty and graduate students, and faculty-sponsored undergraduates and staff. Instructional use is limited to courses that have been approved by the Director for Research Technologies.

Home directories

Home directories reside on the RAC storage system and have a default quota of 10GB. If you need additional permanent storage space, apply for an account on IU's Scholarly Data Archive (SDA).

CPU limits and batch jobs

User processes on the login nodes are limited to 20 minutes of CPU time. Processes exceeding this limit are automatically terminated with no warning. You may run interactive jobs requiring more than 20 minutes of CPU time on nodes b509, b510, b511, and b512. There is a 24-hour CPU time limit on all user processes running on these nodes. If you require more than 24 hours of CPU time, submit a batch job to the LoadLeveler batch queuing system with the llsubmit command.

Computational resources

Each queue has properties defined in order to maximize job throughput and minimize time spent waiting in queue. Submit jobs to the queue most appropriate to the specific job requirements. If no queue is specified, jobs will go into the LONG queue. The total number of idle jobs you may have over all queues is 16. In the DEBUG queue, you may have only one idle job.

For more, see ARCHIVED: Batch jobs on Big Red.

Mail usage

UITS does not provide a production mail service on the Big Red cluster; however, LoadLeveler communicates via email. Mail forwarding should be configured during account creation, but if you are receiving mail on the cluster, you may need to set up a .forward file for your account. For help, see ARCHIVED: How do I forward my mail from a Unix account?

If you plan to run a large number of jobs through Big Red in a relatively short period of time and will be forwarding notifications to an external mail server, make sure the external mail server can handle the load. If you are not absolutely certain that the external email server can handle a large volume of mail, include this line in your jobs:

  # @notification = never

Scheduled downtime

Big Red maintenance windows are scheduled for the first Tuesday of each month. Notice of any emergency downtime will be posted on the IT Notices web page.

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, UITS welcomes your input. Please contact High Performance Systems.

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Last modified on 2018-01-18 15:33:52.