Policies

Acceptable use

Monsoon is to be used for research purposes only. This includes either funded or unfunded research projects occurring in academic departments or research centers at NAU. Research purposes can include data analysis or exploration, computational method development and testing, and other tasks specifically related to research projects. Monsoon cannot be used to host analytic tools (e.g., web-based scientific computing software) for users outside of NAU. Monsoon is not for educational use. If you’re interested in academic computing resources, please contact ITS academic computing at 928-523-9294.

Acknowledgment

If Monsoon contributes to published work, the following acknowledgement should be included, if the publisher’s policy allows for it:

“[Some of the] Computational analyses were run on Northern Arizona University’s Monsoon computing cluster, funded by Arizona’s Technology and Research Initiative Fund.”

Security

Connections to Monsoon are allowed only via SSH with your NAU credentials. This ensures that your authentication and sessions are encrypted.

File transfers can be done either via scp or samba.  Both of these methods require use of your NAU username and password.

Do not share your login credentials. You are responsible for account actions; if it is determined that your account is being shared, it will be disabled.

If you witness suspicious activity, general security incident or abuse, please report it to: ask-arc@nau.edu

Outages

Outages and maintenance will be communicated via the NAUHPC listserv, login node “message of the day”, and posted on the ARC website.

Minor scheduled maintenance does not require the whole cluster to be down and will be communicated with two days notice. This type of maintenance shouldn’t effect running/scheduled jobs.

Examples:

• login node reboot
• minor network maintenance
• brief scheduler outage
• security patches

Major scheduled maintenance requires the whole cluster to be down and will be communicated with two weeks of notice.

Examples:

• storage changes
• major network maintenance

Critical Maintenance is required to resolve critical issues and will be communicated with as much notice as possible.

Examples:

• scheduler outage
• network degradation
• storage degradation
• serious security issues

Unexpected outages will be communicated within one hour of occurrence.

Backups

The only data that is backed up on monsoon is data that resides in your home area. This home area data is backed up to tape. Your home area is also snapshotted twice a day and can be a convenient way to access mistakenly deleted or modified data quickly. To access snapshots, navigate to /home/.snapshot/<date>/<user> .

Data Retention Policy

Your data on monsoon will be retained and treated with the utmost care until your account is no longer active. Once you lose affiliation with NAU, your data will be retained for 6 months at which point it will be deleted.

Terms of Service

In order to confirm your HPC account, you must read and accept the terms listed on both the Policies and the User Agreement.