Compliance with University policy

Users of ALICE must comply with all University ICT policies, including Acceptable Use of Computers.

Resource policy

ALICE represents a unique resource for the research community. The computers have special characteristics that are not found, or are of limited availability, on other central computers. Characteristics include parallel processing, large memory, and a Linux operating system.  The allocation of High Performance Computing (HPC) resources requires close supervision by those charged with management of these resources.  

The login nodes can be used for small, short interactive jobs and for submitting batch jobs, but are not meant for running compute jobs.

Data Storage Policy

ALICE does not provide support for any type of controlled data. No controlled data (GDPR, HIPAA, EAR, FERPA, PII, CUI, ITAR, etc.) can be analyzed or stored on any HPC storage. Users must not transfer sensitive data (data related to people) to ALICE. Data must be anonymized before it can be transferred to ALICE. In case you are unsure about the contents/classification of the data, please contact the helpdesk.

ALICE is not a data management system where research data can be stored for longer periods of time. All data that is transferred to ALICE must be copies of data. Users must make sure that data that is transferred to ALICE remains available somewhere else. All data with value that is generated on ALICE must be moved off ALICE as soon as this is possible after the job completed.

Data in the user’s home directory is backed up. The home directory is intended to store scripts, software, executables etc, but is not meant to store large or temporary data sets.

Backup and Restore

We do nightly incremental backups of the home and software file system.

Files that are open at the time of the backup will be skipped.

We can restore files and/or directories when you accidentally remove them up to 35 days back, provided they already existed during the last successful backup.

There is no backup for the shared scratch file system.