General
Policies

Ethical Guidelines

All users must follow the Institute's ethical guidelines. In particular, passwords must NOT be shared with anyone! Every individual with access to the facility should have his/her own user account and password.

Privacy

The default file permissions for the new user is read/write/execute by the user and read/execute by the user's group. A principal investigator has the right to access data and files in his/her research group. In the event that the P.I. has difficulty doing this, he or she may contact the Research Programs Administrator or the Head of Technical Support.

Technical support staff do not read a user's email or files or alter them without the user's permission except in cases of emergency and only within the scope of administrative responsibilities.

Background Jobs

All background jobs must be submitted through the queueing system (PBS). Jobs submitted through PBS are suspended when someone is actively using the console. The technical support staff reserves the right to kill any background job not submitted through PBS which last longer than 30 minutes or adversely affects a user at the console. There will be limits on amounts of memory and the number of CPU hours permitted. See the PBS guide on how to use PBS and the available queues.

Disk Quota

Each user is allocated a limited amount of home directory space (currently 500 MB). Home directories are backed up nightly. If additional space is needed please contact help@msi.umn.edu.

Temporary Disk Space

The local disk space in /usr/tmp will be cleared weekly. For longer term temporary space, /wrk and /scratch are available. Any file older than and unchanged for 30 days will be deleted. The technical support staff will work with users to accommodate longer term, large disk requirements as resources permit. Temporary disk space (/usr/tmp, /scratch, and /wrk) are NEVER backed up by technical support staff.

Unattended Workstations

Users must log out of the console whenever they leave the workstation for more than a few minutes.