Policies of the High Performance Computing Center at WSU have been established to give access to all users to the resources of the center.  Details are outlined below in the following categories.

User accounts
Any WSU faculty, student or post-doc that requests an account will be given time on our systems.  See our User Information page for more details.

CPU usage
 For jobs that require large amounts of memory or cpu time, users should run jobs in batch mode with Portable Batch System (PBS). 

Users will access cronus only. From cronus, users will submit jobs to run on zeus and on the apollo and artemis clusters.

When users access the system, they will find that the execution nodes on zeus, apollo and artemis refer to cronus as cronus-b. That is simply the internal name for cronus in the private network.

In order to manage resources we have set up the following run limits. There are 7 batch queues:
short:      4 hour time limit, 1 cpu
long:       48 hour time limit, 1 cpu
compile:    48 hour limit, 1 cpu
stdin:      48 hour limit, any number of cpu's, must use -I on qsub
para:       48 hour limit, 2-4 cpu's
para8:      48 hour limit, 5-8 cpu's
 

To view the current limits of the various queues, run qstat -q.

The system administrator may adjust the queues as needed to allow for maximum utilization while avoiding oversubscription (too many jobs active). In addition, the system administrator may release queued jobs when other queues are underutilized. Thus, the qstat report may show more jobs running than allowed.

Cautions:
Please do not run single process serial jobs in the para queue.
Please do not leave interative PBS sessions (-I parameter) inactive for an extended period of time. . Do not start an interactive session just to reserve a slot and not use it. If there are jobs waiting in the same queue, then an idle job is subject to cancellation

Disk usage
We do not back up the user data in /user. All users are responsible for their own backups.