ARCHER Usage Policy

In addition to the rules and regulations applying to the use of ARCHER to which you will have agreed when registering the Plasma HEC Consortium also insists users follow the following guidelines.

  • Our allocation of disk space on /work is limited. Our only choice is to ensure /work is free for running jobs. Therefore when your job is completed as soon as possible data must be removed from /work. This can be by copying to the RDF store for example. Details of the RDF store are on the ARCHER web pages.

  • In relation to disk use it is the responsibility of the project leaders to ensure a sensible disk use and visualisation strategy is in place. This can mean optimising MPI-IO correctly or ensuring visualisation tools which work on RDF, not just /work, are used. If needed some limited help is available from Plasma-HEC support staff at Warwick and Daresbury/RAL. If continued excessive use of /home persists the project may be suspended until a the code IO and visualation tools are rewritten.

  • The default e281 account on ARCHER is for testing and scaling analysis only. Not for production jobs. Therefore the largest job which can be submitted to this project is 128 CPU hours.

  • Evidence may be required for grant renewal that the codes have been optimised for ARCHER. Courses exist on profilers and optimizing codes. It is the PIs resposibility to ensure appropriate measures are taken to optimiser their code.

  • Papers published which used the HEC ARCHER allocation must acknowledge the Plasma HEC Consortium EPSRC grant numbers EP/L000237/1 and EP/R029148/1. Papers which do not reference this grant may be ineligble as outputs for renewal of the HEC allocation in March 2020 so this is important.

  • Any published work which benefited from the CoSeC support from STFC must acknowledge this on posters, talks and papers. Add the following to acknowledgments “This work made use of computational support by CoSeC, the Computational Science Centre for Research Communities, through CCP-Plasma/Plasma-HEC”

Repeat offenders will have their accounts suspended. This policy is essential so that our allocation can be used fairly by all members.

Plasma-HEC and CCP-Plasma acknowledge the funding support it receives from EPSRC through CoSeC within STFC’s Scientific Computing Department.