Guidelines and Terms of use

Please familiarise yourself thoroughly with the following:

• All users should use the PBS Torque queue manager for submitting jobs.

• Please do not run jobs directly on the main headnode wonko.bi.up.ac.za.

• Computing resources are managed by the queuing system.

• Storage resources however, have user quotas, and are billed for, according to our billing policy (See Storage Quotas and Charges).

• Both users, and their supervisors should familiarise themselves with the quota system, and the costs incurred.

• Home directories - every user gets allocated 500 GB on the file server at /home/<username>. The purpose of this is to serve as a landing spot when you log in, and for storing documents and similar files. It is expressly not intended for research data.

• Data directories - every user also gets allocated by default 1 TB on our fast Lustre storage at /nlustre/users/<username>. 

• This is where your large files must go, and where you should process from, and store towards during processing.

• This storage may not be used for backup of any other systems, PC's, laptops or data. You may also not store personal data such as movies, music files and photos here. Its intended for bona fide research activities on Bioinformatics servers only.

• The home directories get backed up daily with a retention period of 2 weeks for multiple versions.

• Due to its size, the Lustre directories get replicated to our replication storage once per week.

• You must request installation of utilities and software applications from the systems admin, who will evaluate the best solution for you, and perform the installation system-wide. You may not install or attempt to install such locally under your own account (trying to use utilities like brew or conda will simply not work).