Research IT (formerly TCHPC) Policies are detailed on the following pages:
| Policy Page | Description |
|---|---|
| Access Policies | Overview of which Research IT Resources are available to various Research Groups and Higher Education Institutes, and the College and Research IT Policies for gaining access to these resources. |
| Account Policies | An overview of Research IT account policies. |
| Acknowledgement Policies | A requirement of usage of Research IT Resources is acknowledgement of the Funding Agencies which have provided the resources. |
| Cluster Scheduling Policies | An overview of the various queuing/scheduling policies which are in place on Research IT clusters. |
| Cookie Statement | A description of how Cookies are used in our websites. |
| Data Management Policies | An overview of how disk space is allocated per project group, disk quotas, how project lifetimes affect data which is stored on Research IT systems, and notes about TCD data policies and good research practices. |
| Systems Administration Policies | A note on systems administration tasks which may occasionally be undertaken in order to preserve system stability and functionality. |
Access to Research IT resources is subject to Trinity College’s policies and terms & conditions. These are available at https://www.tcd.ie/itservices/about/policies-terms-and-support-statements/
The following rules also apply
An account on any RIT systems may only be used by the authorized account holder.
Use of RIT facilities and services for commercial purposes is prohibited unless agreed otherwise.
Exploitation of defective configurations, program errors or any other method to secure a higher level of privilege than authorized is prohibited.
Sabotage or other damaging or disruptive activities directed against the RIT facilities or other users is prohibited.
An account will be setup for a fixed time period, but a maximum of one year before details verification is required.
Access to Research IT services is not automatically setup. Researchers must apply for an account with Research IT.
An account on any RIT systems may only be used by the authorized account holder.
An account will be setup for a fixed time period, but a maximum of one year before details verification is required.
Research IT accounts are set to automatically expire after a certain period. This is to ensure only active accounts exist on our systems and stale accounts are removed. In advance of the expiration date account holders will be emailed to advise their account will expire. It is the account holders responsibility to request an account extension. To request an account extension please email ops@tchpc.tcd.ie.
Research IT maintains it’s own authentication system which is separate from the authentication system used to login to most Trinity services such as email, computers in offices and labs, etc. This means that your Research IT credentials can be different from your Trinity credentials. Research IT need an authentication system separate from the usual Trinity one to facilitate collaborators from non Trinity institutions who are collaborating with Trinity Researchers.
Research IT operates High End Computing facilities for general use by research staff & postgraduate students in Trinity College. Two of these system have been funded such that general access is also available to the broader Irish research community based in the HEI’s. Some computational resources have been funded through specific research projects for the use of specific groups or consortia - access to these resources is restricted.
Undergraduate students don’t automatically need access to our systems, usually it is in the context of a final year or summer project, etc. Undergraduates who request Research IT accounts will have to have the support of a Trinity academic supervisor to get access.
Note: If you are not a TCD staff member or student you will also need to submit a third party access form, this form can be found on the application page.
Personal data collected to set-up your account will not be disseminated to third parties without your permission and will only be used by staff at the Centre to comply with our obligations.
A precondition to using our systems and/or services is that you agree to allowing us to publish and disseminate an abstract of your work and any resulting publications that are enabled by these systems and/or services and make this information available to our funders and College authorities.
If you have any queries about our data protection policies please contact us.
Please note that all publications (journals, theses, articles etc) describing work undertaken which has used or benefited from Research IT Resources must acknowledge the relevant funding agencies and Research IT / TCHPC (see more below for a per-cluster breakdown).
In particular, Research IT Resources include:
All Research IT clusters (e.g. Lonsdale, Parsons, Kelvin)
File storage
Use of the Visualisation Facilities
Consultation / Software Development
Managed/Hosted Services
This work was supported by RIT (Research IT, Trinity College Dublin).
In addition to RIT, all publications must acknowledge SFI (Science Foundation Ireland).
Please use the following acknowledgement line:
All calculations were performed on the Lonsdale cluster maintained by the Trinity Centre for High Performance Computing. This cluster was funded through grants from Science Foundation Ireland.
In addition to RIT, all publications must acknowledge SFI (Science Foundation Ireland).
Please use the following acknowledgement line:
All calculations were performed on the Parsons cluster maintained by the Trinity Centre for High Performance Computing. This cluster was funded through grants from Science Foundation Ireland.
In addition to RIT, all publications must acknowledge e-INIS (the Irish National e-Infrastructure).
Please use the following acknowledgement line:
All calculations were performed on the Kelvin cluster maintained by the Trinity Centre for High Performance Computing. This cluster was funded through grants from the Higher Education Authority, through its PRTLI program.
In addition to RIT, all publications must acknowledge the ERC (European Research Council) and SFI (Science Foundation Ireland).
Please use the following acknowledgement line:
All calculations were performed on the Boyle cluster maintained by the Trinity Centre for High Performance Computing. This cluster was funded through grants from the European Research Council and Science Foundation Ireland.
In addition to RIT, all publications must acknowledge SFI (Science Foundation Ireland).
Please use the following acknowledgement line:
All calculations were performed on the Tinney cluster maintained by the Trinity Centre for High Performance Computing (Research IT). This cluster is funded form a Grant from Science Foundation Ireland under Grant number 18/FRL/6188.
In addition to RIT, all publications must acknowledge the Trinity College Dublin School of Physics and IRC (Irish Research Council) grant award IRCLA/2022/3788.
Please use the following acknowledgement line:
All calculations were performed on the astro01 system maintained by the Trinity Centre for High Performance Computing (Research IT). This system is co-funded by the School of Physics and by the Irish Research Council grant award IRCLA/2022/3788.
If you require logos for publications please contact us and we will send you a copy of the logos.
| Cluster | Full Resource Allocation | Fair Share | Closed Access |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crusher | No | No | Yes |
| Lonsdale | Yes | Yes | No |
| Kelvin | Yes | Yes | No |
| Parsons | No | Yes | Yes |
| TCIN | No | No | Yes |
| Seagull | No | Yes | Yes |
| Pople | No | Yes | Yes |
| Dalton | No | Yes | Yes |
| Boyle | No | Yes | Yes |
| Boole | No | Yes | Yes |
Full Resource Allocation means that jobs will only be run if they have a valid job ‘account code’ or ‘project code’ with a positive balance of available hours. See our Resource Allocation pages for details on how to apply for a resource allocation
Fair Share means that the more you use the cluster, the lower your relative priority will become. This allows new users and/or users who have not used much time recently to go higher up the queue, and allows a ‘fair’ usage of the cluster.
Closed Access means that only certain groups have access to the system. See our Access Policies for more.
For Kelvin and Lonsdale each cluster has two main queues/partitions:
A debug partition, with a small number of nodes and a short wall-time. This is to be used for small test or development runs. The short wall-time enables a very quick turn-around, and faster access.
A compute partition, which comprises the bulk of the cluster. The maximum wall-time will be a number of days (between 2 and 4, depending on the specific cluster). Most jobs should be submitted here.
Please refer to sinfo on each cluster for more specific limits and available resources. See this page for more on Slurm commands.
Most other clusters only have one compute partition. Some other clusters, such as Parsons and Boole, have additional partitions.
From June 2011, Research IT (RIT) have implemented a new set of data management policies. This allows us to cleanly remove old data from the system.
All existing and new users must read and comply with the policies below, and in particular should take note of all data deletion policies for user and group directories.
RIT data storage facilities are not available for long-term data storage - they are made available for the lifetime of user and group projects, and data will be deleted upon user and project expiration.
There are two storage pools, (which contain the same data), available to the main clusters (lonsdale, parsons, kelvin and accessible via the rsync access node): /home and /projects.
To view your quota, use the myquota utility. The reports both user quotas and project quotas. See this link for more details on Quotas.
User home directories are stored on the global /home partition.
In order to enable more efficient data management processes and provide disaster recovery and snapshot services:
/home is restricted to 5TB, with 50GB allocated per user (enforced by quotas).
Users should use /home to store data input files and submission scripts, results files, and where appropriate source code.
On a monthly basis, all directories and files in /home are backed up for disaster recovery purposes.
Upon user account expiry, there will be a grace period of 1 month for users to copy files from their home directory as required before their home directory and all its files will be deleted. The user will be sent automated emails warning about their account expiry in advance.
Shared group project files are stored on the global /projects partition:
On the /projects partition:
All projects are allocated cpu and storage resources.
Please ensure that job outputs are be written to a project directory and not to home directories.
The data in /projects is not backed up. It is the individual users responsibilities to back the data in /projects up.
Principal Investigators and Research Staff/Postgraduates can apply for projects. These are organised per PI.
The directory structure for projects is: /projects/<PI_name>/<project_name>.
Group quotas are enforced per PI, with additional storage granted/removed per group.
Any files which should be shared between group/project members must be placed in a project directory.
Upon project expiry, there will be a grace period of 1 month for users to copy files from the project directory as required before the files will be deleted. All users in the project group (including the project PI) will be sent automated emails warning about this in advance.
The myquota tool can be used to report their quota usage (on home directory, and all project directories).
All users are expected to follow the guidelines provided in the TCD document Good Research Practice, and the TCD Data Access and Data Management Policy.
New accounts are created with ownership and access permissions (of directories and files) restricted by default to the account holder. These permissions can be changed by the user. Each user is responsible for ensuring that their data is kept secure. For more information on ownership and permissions, please consult the notes in our Introduction to Linux course or contact our support team.
Data is not backed up.
Data in project directories is available for a discrete project period and will be deleted once the project expires.
Data is home directories will be backed up for disaster recovery purposes (only) on a monthly basis. Accidentally deleted data will not be retrieved.
Unless otherwise explicitly agreed in writing, services provided by the centre should be used for research purposes only, they may not be used for clinical research or for commercial gain.
Unless otherwise explicitly agreed in writing, services provided by the Centre are not suitable for the storage or processing of clinical, medical, confidential, personal, commercial and/or other types of sensitive information. Users should be mindful of their obligations under the Data Protection acts and (in the case of TCD users) the Good Research Policy guidelines.
If you had files stored on RIT servers and have now left Trinity but wish to access those files (e.g. if you have moved to another institute, but are still collaborating with groups within Trinity) then further to requirements from the College’s Good Research Practice document, we will need you to arrange:
Signoff from your former Head of School & Research Institute before we can process this request.
An undertaking from all parties that the data can cleanly be transferred off campus and that the data does not contain medical, confidential, commercially sensitive, sensitive personal data or records of any form or description.
Please note the following Systems Administration Policies which may have an impact on users:
We reserve the right to perform normal systems administration tasks as necessary in order to keep a functioning and stable set of resources (including clusters, hosted services, hosted servers, storage pools etc).
These tasks may include: killing users’ jobs, killing processes, restarting daemons, rebooting nodes/servers, navigating users’ home/project directories, viewing files, viewing submission scripts, etc.
We undertake to keep this data confidential.
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