Param Shakti Usage Policy and Guidelines

1. Users are required to acknowledge the use of PS in all publications, presentations, thesis, webpages, etc by including the following or similar statement:
   “We acknowledge National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) for providing computing resources of ‘PARAM Shakti’ at IIT Kharagpur, which is implemented by C-DAC and supported by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India.”
   Users are also requested to inform the PS administration on any such outcome for annual reports/documentation/uploading on website, etc.
2. All the announcements about PS will be made in the relevant local newsgroups and/or through the website (www.hpc.iitkgp.ac.in). Users are encouraged to go through such announcements regularly.
3. PS resources are to be used for academic research purpose only.
4. Project Guide/Adviser must have a user account on PS before requesting user accounts for his/her group members.
5. Users should not share the password with anybody else. Using the same account by multiple users is not allowed. Users should monitor their usage of PS, for the purpose of detecting unauthorized use and accounting.
6. Users must not engage in hacking, reverse-engineering or other activities that may constitute infringement of intellectual property rights of others. Users should not engage in activities that may be disparaging to or bring disrepute to the facility and the Institute.
7. Users should ensure that the software, tools, libraries, and the material used or deployed by themselves comply with all the license terms and conditions. PS administration is not responsible for unauthorized licenses and usage.
8. All jobs must be submitted using the Slurm scheduler. Login nodes are meant for simple tasks only – all CPU and/or memory intensive tasks must be run on the compute nodes. Running jobs on login nodes is strictly prohibited. In such instances, the user account will be deactivated immediately.
9. Temporary scratch storage space is provided to all users according to the allocated disk quota. Scratch directories are subjected to automatic deletion without notice, when their time limit expires. Currently, scratch directories/files have a default time limit of 30 days. Data can be held in this temporary storage at your own risk.
10. Each user will have a default disk quota up to 50 GB in his/her home space and up to 2TB (soft limit) in the Scratch space.
11. User is the owner and hence responsible for all data copied and generated using PS, and PS administration is not responsible for the same. Users should ensure the required backup and protection of the data. PS administration is not responsible for compromising accounts, data theft, data publications, data claims, etc.
12. Users’ data stored on scratch directory on PS is not backed up or archived by the system administration. The PS administration is also not responsible for restoring damaged or lost files for users. Backing up and archiving data is the responsibility of the user and his/her Project Guide/Adviser.
13. Accounts Inactive: Accounts (except for faculty) that are not active for more than 90 days will be temporarily locked. For unlocking the account before 180 days, the user should send a request to the PS administration.
14. Accounts Expired or Not Renewed: The account will be locked and, after 90 days, the user account along with its data will be deleted. PS administration will not be responsible for any data loss after the account deletion.
15. Although PS administration will take utmost care in maintaining the resources, there are no guarantees that resources or services will be available at all times, that they will suit every purpose, or that data will never be lost or corrupted. System administration cannot be held responsible for the loss of the data in such events.
16. Access to PS may be unavailable at some times due to scheduled maintenance, upgrades, etc. Access to PS may be unavailable without notification if hardware, software or other issues necessitate immediate maintenance for correction. Notification of all scheduled and unscheduled maintenance will be updated in the website (www.hpc.iitkgp.ac.in) or in the relevant local newsgroups.
17. Faculty/Advisor are required to inform PS administration about the removal of user account of any student leaving the campus permanently.
18. Any unauthorized usage of PS will have their accounts immediately suspended and may be subjected to appropriate disciplinary action as decided by the competent authority of the Institute.

Best Practices for HPC

1. Do NOT run any job which is longer than few minutes on the login nodes. Login node is for compilation of job. It is best to run the job on computes (compute nodes).
2. It is recommended to refer the quick start guide on the Paramshakti website. This should serve as a good starting point for the new users.
3. It is recommended to check the slurm sample scripts at /home/iitkgp/slurm-scripts for job submission.
4. Use the same compiler to compile different parts/modules/library-dependencies of an application. Using different compilers (e.g., pgcc + icc) to compile different parts of an application may cause linking or execution issues.
5. Choosing appropriate compiler switches/flags/options (e.g., -O3) may increase the performance of an application substantially (accuracy of output must be verified). Please refer to documentation of compilers (online / docs present inside compiler installation path / man pages etc.).
6. Modules/libraries used for execution should be the same as those used for compilation. This can be specified in the job submission script.
7. Be aware of the amount of disk space utilized by your job(s). Do an estimate before submitting multiple jobs.
8. Please submit jobs only from $SCRATCH. You can back up your results/summaries in your $HOME.
9. $SCRATCH is NOT backed up! Please download all your data to your Desktop/Laptop.
10. Before installing any software in your home, ensure that it is from a reliable and safe source. Ransomware is on the rise!
11. Please do not use spaces while creating directories and files.
12. Please inform PARAM Shakti support when you notice something strange—e.g., unexpected slowdowns, files missing/corrupted etc.
13. Please do not submit jobs to gpu or gpu-low partition unless your code strictly needs GPU-based computing.
14. Please provide the --time (wall-time) parameter judiciously in the job submission batch script, as it significantly affects queue waiting time.