Policies for Using HTC Submit Servers
If you have not yet requested a CHTC account and met with a Research Computing Facilitator, please fill out this form.
When your account was created, a member of our team emailed you with the server address you should use for logging in. See our connecting guide for additional information.
Access to other submit servers is granted for specific purposes and will have been indicated to you by CHTC staff.
Connecting to HTC Submit Servers
Once your account is active, you can connect to your designated submit server with an SSH connection ("Putty" for Windows, putty.org; "Terminal" for Linux/Max). Note, however, that our submit servers only accept connections from campus networks. Off-campus connections have been disabled for security purposes. If you need to connect from off campus, you can first SSH to a computer in your department, and then SSH to our submit server. You may also be able to use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to join the campus network when working off-campus. DoIT provides information on using a VPN.
For more detailed information on connecting to CHTC services, both logging in and transferring files, see our Connecting to CHTC guide.
General User Policies
See our User Policies and Expectations for details on general CHTC policies.
HTC System Specific Limits
Below are some of the default limits on CHTC’s HTC system. Note that as a large-scale computing center, we want you to be able to run at a large scale - often much larger than these defaults. Please contact the facilitation team whenever you encounter one of these limits so we can adjust your account settings or discuss alternative ways to achieve your computing goals.
- Jobs with long runtimes. There is a default run limit of 72 hours for each job queued in the HTC System, once it starts running. Jobs longer than this will be placed in HTCondor's "hold" state. If your jobs will be longer, please email us, and we'll help you to determine the best solution.
- Submitting many jobs from one submit file. HTCondor is designed to submit thousands (or more) jobs from one submit file. If you are submitting over 10,000 jobs per submit file or want to queue more than 50,000 total jobs as a single user, please email us as we have strategies to submit that many jobs in a way that will ensure you have as many jobs running as possible without also compromising queue performance.
- Submitting many short jobs from one submit file. While HTCondor is designed to submit thousands of jobs at a time, many short jobs can overwhelm the submit server, resulting in other jobs taking much longer to start than usual. If you plan on submitting over 1000 jobs per submit file, we ask that you ensure each job has a minimum run time of 5 minutes (on average).
- The default disk quota is 20 GB in your
/homedirectory, as a starting point. You can track your use of disk space and your quota value, using our Quota Guide. If you need more space for concurrent work, please see our Request a Quota Change guide. - Submitting jobs with "large" files: HTCondor's normal file transfer mechanism ("transfer_input_files") is good for files up to 100MB in size (or 500MB total, per job). For jobs with larger files, please see our guide on File Availability Options, and contact us to make arrangements.