Minnesota Supercomputer Institute

Scientific Development and Visualization Laboratory Techical Information

Submitting Jobs

In order to make efficient use of workstations, the SDVL Steering Committe has established a policy for the use of workstations.

  1. A user on the console of a machine has the highest priority for that machine's resources
  2. SDVL workstations are primarily for Graphics and Visualization work and code development, not for running resource intensive calculations.
  3. On the other hand, CPU cycles should not be wasted. All background jobs must be submitted through the Portable Batch System (PBS). Jobs submitted through the queuing systems are suspended when someone is actively using the console.
  4. Technical Support Staff reserves the right to kill any background job running on an Institute workstation that was not submitted via the queuing system and has a noticeable effect on the console performance.

To implement this policy, queueing systems have been installed so that jobs can be run without interfering with the console user.See our queue configuration for more information.

Disk Quotas

To effectively manage disk space, the Institute implements a disk quota system. Users are initially allocated 1GB of disk space in the file system containing their home directory. Users should regularly check their quota by typing quota -v. It will produce output similar to the following for the example username george:

Disk quotas for george (uid 999999)
Filesystem usage quota limit timeleft files quota limit timeleft
/home/msi-s1 14993 20000 25000 3090 50000 50000

where the usage values are in kilobytes, and the file values are numbers of files.

You should remove, compress, or write out to alternate storage any files that are not immediately needed. For further information about compressing files, enter man compress or man gzip. If large amounts of temporary storage are needed on the Institute's workstations, use the directory /scratch. There are no restrictions on this space other than that files not modified for more than 14 days are automatically removed. If you need more time, please send email to user support asking for more time.

If you need the amount of permanent, backed-up disk space increased, please request that your quota be increased by contacting the technical support staff by email or calling (612) 626-0802.

If you are running a job and the system tells you that your quota limit is exceeded, you should:

  1. Abort the process or processes in progress on the file system that has reached its limit
  2. Remove enough files to bring the limit back below quota
  3. Retry the failed program

If you are in the middle of an editor session and are unable to write out a file due to a shortage of quota, i.e., the system reports "shortage of quota," write out your file to /tmp. Then, remove files to bring yourself below your limit and copy the file from /tmp to your home directory. If you encounter a problem with this process, please contact the Institute's technical support staff by email or calling (612) 626-0802.

VideoScratch

The VideoScratch file system consists of two 80 GB disks in a RAID configuration for fast temporary working space on the video editing workstation m2 (Mac G4). This space will never be backed up. You may leave files here that you are working on but if additional space is needed any files older than 14 days may be deleted first. Exceptionally large files or folders of files may also be deleted at any time. Please plan accordingly.

You may ask for an extension on your video directory (folder). To do so, send email to user support. Include the name of the directory and a date when the files can be removed. Files in the specified directory will not be removed until the given date.

Please clean up when you are done with work files on this space.

CD Writer

A CD-RW drive is installed on the IBM Intellistation (pc1). This drive allows users to create their own CDs in various formats. It will read and write both CD-R and CD-RW media. If CD-R (CD Recordable) media is used, the data can only be written once. CD-RW (CD Rewritable) media allows users to use the disk over and over again, rewriting over the data.

The advantage of the CD-R media is lower cost and also you can use the disks with most standard CD players. CD-RW media costs more and doesn't work in many CD readers. The capacity of both media types is about 650 MB.

To take advantage of the drive, we have the Adaptec DirectCD and Adaptec EasyCD Creator software installed. When you load a disk into the CD-RW drive, the software will try to try to determine what type of disk is in the drive. If you loaded unformatted media, the a dialog box will be presented asking you what type of CD you wish to create. The software is largely self-documenting. Contact help@msi.umn.edu if you problems using it.

One of the options that the DirectCD software will give you is to create a CD that you can use like a floppy, ie copy and delete files from the desktop. It should be noted that this format is not very portable. Similar software needs to be installed on other workstation on which you plan to use this disk. For maximum portability, the disks should be formatted with the ISO9660 format.