Minnesota Supercomputer Institute

SGI Altix Cluster Policies and Procedures

Information about the policies and procedures applicable to this machine. For policies and procedures common to all machines, see the main policy page.

Wall clock limits

The Altix system is configured so that some nodes are reserved for jobs running 24 hours or less. This allows for rapid turnaround of jobs that require a short amount of time. Nine nodes permit a maximum wall clock time of 150 hours, and one node permits a maximum of 300 hours.

Wall Clock Limits of SGI Altix Nodes
Wall Time Nodes
24 hours Two 16-processor Altix 350s
150 hours Eight 16-processor Altix 350s
One 256-processor Altix 3700 BX2
300 hours One 48-processor Altix 3700

The Altix 3700 BX2 is for parallel jobs requesting eight or more processors. Jobs requesting less than eight processors are not run on this system, not even for backfill.

Home Directories and Disks

There is 2.4 TB of file space has been allocated for user home directories. The default quota for home directories is 5 GB.

Scratch Space

There is a total of 4.4 TB of file space allocated for scratch files in the /scratch1, /scratch2, /scratch3, and /scratch4 filesystems. The default quota for scratch space is 50 GB in each of the scratch filesystems. A scratch clean up process runs daily on the system and all files in the scratch directories that have not been modified for 14 days will be deleted.

Users may request exceptions to the scratch clean up and additions to their quotas by sending e-mail to user support.