SuperCloud Practices

Standard

Standard MIT Policy on the use of information technology resources apply to all accounts on the SuperCloud system. You can find MIT's policy on the use of information technology resources here.

Access

It is our practice to provide access from within the United States.

Backing up Data and Files

We do not back up files on SuperCloud. We strongly recommend that you regularly move files back to your local workstation. See the page Accessing and Transferring Data and Files for instructions on how to copy your files.

Lincoln Collaborations

Lincoln collaborators are eligible for the standard resource allocation once the Practical HPC course certificate ID is added to the User Profile, and for temporary resource allocation increases. See the page Requesting an Account for the list of Lincoln collaborations.

Non-Public Data

Not all data is appropriate for SuperCloud. If your data is not publicly available, we ask for any agreements or requirements you have for your data to make sure SuperCloud is the right place to be putting the data. Please be as detailed as you can. To get a general idea of the sorts of data that may or may not be appropriate for SuperCloud, take a look at MIT IS&T's guidance for storing data in Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive here.

Regular Maintenance

SuperCloud has Monthly Downtimes which are scheduled for the Second Tuesday of each month.

We usually start carefully draining the scheduler of jobs on Monday evening. Our automated re-imaging scripts kick off at 12:01 am on Tuesday. The re-imaging usually takes much of our sleeping hours, and in the morning the SuperCloud system engineers begin the planned hardware replacements and software validation.

During the maintenance period, the Jupyter Portal, the Database Portal, and all of the compute nodes are unavailable.

While we occasionally are able to get the system back to users on Tuesday afternoon, we usually get it back to users by Wednesday morning.

We send an email with a reminder of the scheduled downtime to all users. When the maintenance is complete, an email will be sent informing users that the system has been returned to service. If you do not receive these emails, please contact supercloud@mit.edu.

If the scheduled maintenance day falls on the day of a campus closure (for example, a holiday) the downtime will occur on the third Tuesday of the month. Off-schedule downtimes do happen and are announced in advance.