Terms of Usage and User Responsibilities

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  1. Data is not backed up. None of the data on our HPC systems is backed up. The data that you keep in your home directory, /tmp or any other filesystem is exposed to immediate and permanent loss at all times. You are responsible for mitigating your own risk. We suggest you store copies of hard-to-reproduce data on systems that are backed up, for example, the AFS filesystem maintained by ITS.
  2. Your usage is tracked and may be used for reports. We track a lot of job data and store it for a long time. We use this data to generate usage reports and look at patterns and trends. We may report this data, including your individual data, to your adviser, department head, dean, or other administrator or supervisor.
  3. Maintaining the overall stability of the system is paramount to us. While we make every effort to ensure that every job completes with the most efficient and accurate way possible, the good of the whole is more important to us than the good of an individual. This may affect you, but mostly we hope it benefits you. System availability is based on our best efforts. We are staffed to provide support during normal business hours. We try very hard to provide support as broadly as possible, but cannot guarantee support on a 24 hour per day basis. Additionally, we perform system maintenance on a periodic basis, driven by the availability of software updates, staffing availability, and input from the user community. We do our best to schedule around your needs, but there will be times when the system is unavailable. For scheduled outages, we will announce them at least one month in advance on the ARC home page; for unscheduled outages we will announce them as quickly as we can with as much detail as we have on that same page. You can also follow ARC at Twitter name @umichARC.
  4. Our HPC systems are intended only for non-commercial, academic research and instruction. Commercial use of some of the software on our HPC clusters is prohibited by software licensing terms. Prohibited uses include product development or validation, any service for which a fee is charged, and, in some cases, research involving proprietary data that will not be made available publicly. Please contact arc-support@umich.edu if you have any questions about this policy, or about whether your work may violate these terms.
  5. You are responsible for the security of sensitive codes and data. If you will be storing export-controlled or other sensitive or secure software, libraries, or data on the cluster, it is your responsibility that is is secured to the standards set by the most restrictive governing rules.  We cannot reasonably monitor everything that is installed on the cluster, and cannot be responsible for it, leaving the responsibility with you, the end user.
  6. Data subject to HIPAA regulations may not be stored or processed on the cluster. For assistance with HIPAA-related computational research please contact Jeremy Hallum, ARC liaison to the Medical School, at jhallum@med.umich.edu.

User Responsibilities:

  • Users should make requests by email arc-support@umich.edu .
  • Users are responsible for maintaining MCommunity groups used for MReport authorizations.
  • Users must manage data appropriately in their various locations:
    • /home
    • /scratch
    • /tmp and /var/tmp
    • customer-provided NFS