Good Citizenship

Nightingale is set up differently than a general HPC cluster, making it less likely that your actions on it will impact other users. However, you should still aim to be a good citizen of the resource and use it in ways that will not impact others in your group. Some ways you can do this are described below.

Coordinate with your group members

If your group has a dedicated interactive node, then that node is generally dedicated to your use, and you may use as many resources as you like. Keep in mind that if you are running a lot of processes, it may fill your node and someone else in your group won’t be able to use it. It is good practice to let others in your group know when you are doing this so they can plan their runs accordingly.

Manage your allocation wisely

Nightingale’s scheduling system is responsible for ensuring that you have the resources you need when running jobs on its compute nodes. Therefore, you shouldn’t be able to do anything to impact other user jobs. However, you must still use your allocation on the compute nodes wisely. If you or someone in your group uses a large amount of the allocation, there may not be enough for others to use.

Use the login nodes responsibly

Nightingale’s login nodes are a shared resource for all users. You use these nodes to conduct the activities necessary to prepare your applications such as editing, compiling, building your programs, and short non-intensive runs. This is important to remember. What you do on the login node can impact system performance and affect other users. System administrators may terminate your user processes if you negatively impact the system.