Job running:
All jobs MUST be run through PBS. If you need more information on using PBS, please take a look at the PBS FAQ .
Logging in:
To login to PrairieFire, please use ssh . From a unix/linux machine with ssh installed, type 'ssh @prairiefire.unl.edu' where is your username.
Publishing/Acknowledgements
RCF asks to be notified of any presentation or publication that results in entirely or in part from use of RCF. If possible and practical, please send an electronic copy to David Swanson , Director of RCF. In addition, please mail a hard copy of publications to David Swanson, 121 S 13th st. Suite 304, UNL CC-0225.
Users are asked to include the following line as acknowledgement of RCF use: This work was completed utilizing the Research Computing Facility of the University of Nebraska -- Lincoln.
Account 'Ownership'
All accounts on RCF machines are to be 'owned' by the research advisor or head of the group you signed up with. This does not allow for a research advisor to snoop through his/her groups' files, but does allow them to retrieve data for research purposes. Further, all files on RCF machines can be searched through by RCF admins for purposes of solving machine problems (ie. checking for breaking of policy or trying to find out why the machine is being bogged down) or for machine security.
Node Limits
The policy for the use of Prairiefire is that you are restricted to the number of nodes you use by your research group. To see the limits see below .
Job Running
Please do not run jobs directly on the head node. It is reserved exclusively for login and interaction with the queue. The scheduler used is PBS Pro and it is set up to interface seamlessly with your MPI jobs. Under no circumstances should you submit an MPI job manually from the head node. To ensure that the load across the cluster is properly balanced as well as to prevent time-critical applications such as benchmarking, use of the queue is imperative.
Currently the pbs queues have the following settings:
| Queue Name | CPU | Jobs | Time |
| short | 32 | 8 | 72 hours |
| long | 8 | 8 | 360 hours |
| debug | 2 | 2 | 15 min |
Please also know that if you publish, are a co-pi or a pi for a grant, or if you donate money, you will be allowed extra resources.
1 Publication = 1 unit
1 Co-PI = 4 units
1 PI = 6 units
Donating money = negotiated
Queue Statistics
A page has been set up to report aggregate statistics for the PBS queues on Prairiefire. The URL is http://rcf.unl.edu/prairiefire/PFstats.php . More statistics are being added in real time!
User Regulations:
- Users are not allowed to rsh to any interior nodes, and working there, unless under special permission from the system administrators.
- Submit jobs by pbs, NEVER use nohup and &, or run large cpu intensive programs on head node.
- Users are also agreeing to abide by the Guidelines for the Use of Computing Resources at UNL.
PrairieFire support:
Contact RCF Support ( rcf-support@unl.edu )
