Usage policy

Additional information

General Terms of Use for CSC's Services for Research and Education

When you login to CSC supercomputers, you end up on one of the login nodes of the cluster. These login nodes are shared by all users and they are not intended for heavy computing.

The login nodes should be used only for:

compiling
managing batch jobs
moving data
light pre- and postprocessing

Here light means one-core jobs that finish in minutes and require less than 1 GiB of memory at maximum. All other tasks are to be done in compute nodes either as normal batch jobs or as interactive batch jobs. Programs not adhering to these rules will be terminated without warning.

Important

The login nodes are not meant for long or heavy processes.

Disk cleaning

Each project has disk space in the directory /scratch/<project>. This fast parallel scratch space is intended for data that is in active use. To ensure that the parallel disk system does not run out of storage space and to keep performance acceptable CSC automatically removes files in scratch that have not been accessed in a long time. The performance of a parallel file system starts to degrade when it fills up, and the more it fills up, the slower the performance will get.

The current policy in Puhti is that files that have not been accessed for 6 months or more will be removed. This cleaning will happen regularly, and each time users are informed at least 1 month in advance. CSC also provides lists of files that are about to be removed and instructions for how one can transfer important files to more suitable disk systems.

A similar procedure will be introduced on Mahti, but it is not yet in place. The policy is still that users should keep only actively used data in scratch.

GPU nodes

Puhti and Mahti GPUs should only be used for workloads that greatly benefit from GPU capacity compared to using CPUs or which can't be run on CPUs. In particular AI/ML workloads are prioritized, since many of them cannot be done at all on CPUs. A good rule of thumb is to compare the billing unit (BU) usage (e.g. with seff or the billing unit calculator) of the job on GPUs against CPUs and select the one using less.

For Puhti and Mahti, this means that a full node of CPU cores roughly equals one GPU. However, since Puhti and Mahti have more CPU capacity than GPU, you might get access to CPUs with less queuing. Note that LUMI has a lot of GPU capacity which is also "cheaper" as measured in BUs, and on LUMI it's better to use GPUs if possible for your research. In any case, always make sure you use resources efficiently.

Conda installations

Due to performance issues of Conda-based environments on parallel file systems, CSC has deprecated the direct usage of Conda installations. This means that any Conda environments you intend to use must be installed within a container. See Conda best practices for more information.

Tykky

Please consider the Tykky container wrapper for easy containerization of Conda and pip environments.

Running out of billing units

In Puhti and Mahti the users need billing units to use the services. When a project runs out of billing units the ability to use the service will be limited in two phases. Immediately after running out of billing units no new jobs can be submitted. Jobs that are running are not interrupted and will run until completion/timeout. After a 30-day grace period the access to /projappl and /scratch folders will be disabled. No data is deleted, it is only access that is disabled. Data will, however, still be removed from /scratch in the normal cleaning process.

If you are not using a project actively we encourage you to migrate any data that you still need within the 30-day grace period and then close the project in MyCSC.

If you are still actively using the project you can gain access to the compute resources and storage by applying for more billing units.