Acceptable Use Policy

General NU HPC terms and conditions

• Computing resources including but not limited to CPUs, GPUs, RAM, storage space, network bandwidth are to be used only for work directly related to PIs research projects, which aim to advance NU's mission of education and research. NU HPC resources cannot be used for personal activities and personal gain.
• The University extends access to its HPC facilities to its faculty, students, research staff, and, in some instances, research partners for the duration of research projects.

NU HPC users must abide by the following policies

• User accounts must not be shared. No proxy work is allowed. An individual must not connect to HPC facilities or submit jobs on behalf of someone else.
• Sharing user credentials is prohibited.
• No commercial work is permitted unless authorized by NU administration and HPC Team.
• Users must follow the general guidelines established at NU regarding networking and cybersecurity.
• Users must comply with resource limits as defined in the job scheduling software and/or communicated by the NU HPC Team. If at all possible, users should plan large scale experiments and computations during off-load periods  (e.g. night time, weekends, holidays).
• Users are not allowed running applications for personal gain on any of NU HPC facilities, such as applications that mine cryptocurrency.
• Users must not execute jobs or any long process with high core, memory, or storage load on the login node.
• Users must not make fraudulent requests for HPC resources.
• Users should make their best effort to avoid over-subscribing requested resources. Examples include a situation when a job script header requests resources for a particular number of parallel processes/threads while the actual number of parallel processes/threads executed exceeds that number.
• Users should make their best effort to avoid under-subscribing requested resources. Examples include a situation when a job script requests a large number of CPU cores or an exclusive use of an entire node, while the actual job is serial (or uses few parallel processes) and needs only a small amount of memory and low memory bandwidth.
• Direct access of compute nodes and running interactive commands on them is not allowed. Compute nodes may be accessed only by means of submitting and executing batch jobs.
• Users must not intentionally or negligently cause a file system to run out of space.
• Users must never try to circumvent the established login procedures on any NU HPC system or otherwise attempt to gain access where they are not allowed.
• Users must not facilitate or help with anyone's illegal access to NU HPC systems.
• Users should make their best effort to avoid unnecessary, repeated, and excessive data writing that may cause premature degradation of storage devices.
• Users should not store non research related files or data.
• PI's or their named delegate are responsible for notifying NU HPC Team when project users should be deactivated due to their departure, termination, or end of project.
• Users should mention Nazarbayev University Research Computing in an acknowledgment section of a publication if NU HPC facilities played any significant role in obtaining results for this publication.

Revocation of access

Any infringement of the above terms may result in user's account being suspended and/or disciplinary actions taken.

Abandoned accounts

• Accounts that have never been logged into may be deleted after 12 months.
• Accounts not accessed in over 12 month may be deleted in the event NU HPC admins cannot contact the researcher to establish a continued need.
• Accounts may be deleted if their owners are no longer affiliated with NU and have no valid NU email address.

Personal information agreement

• NU HPC team retains the right to monitor all activities and resource utilization on all facilities it operates, as well as to collect data for accounting and reporting purposes, understanding typical patterns, and improving the services it provides.
• Users agree that their name, surname, email address, affiliation, position, and phone numbers are processed by the NU HPC Team in order to provide associated services.

Warranty disclaimer

• NU HPC facilities are provided to users without any explicit or implicit warranty or commitment to a particular service level.
• NU HPC Team accepts no responsibility for the performance of its services, for the correctness or completeness of any outputs and results obtained while using its facilities.
• NU HPC Team accepts no responsibility for the loss of any user data stored on its facilities.