Quest Policies and Guidelines
This document describes the policies and procedures governing access to Northwestern University’s high-performance computing (HPC) and associated storage facilities. These facilities are managed for Northwestern research activities by Northwestern IT's Research Computing and Data Services in conjunction with Northwestern IT Cyberinfrastructure.
Access, Resources, and Security
The guidelines below are intended to ensure that Northwestern’s HPC facilities are distributed equitably, effectively used, and support Northwestern research programs that rely on computational resources not available elsewhere at the University. Failure to abide by these guidelines may result in the suspension or cancellation of the project and associated compute and storage resources access along with the permanent removal of all offending or associated users.
- Access to the HPC cluster (Quest) requires a valid Northwestern NetID. Researchers with affiliate and temporary NetIDs may access Quest resources; however, the Project Sponsor must be a Northwestern University employee (faculty, postdocs, and staff) or a fellow. Northwestern University employees (faculty, postdocs, and staff), fellows, and currently enrolled students can act as Project Leads and Project Managers.
- Multiple Projects on Quest should not be requested for the same research project (such as activities funded under the same award) in order to obtain separate compute and storage resources. Members of the same research team may not request individual Projects and resources on Quest while working on the same research. Instead, all collaborating researchers should be added to a single Project and use the resources associated with that Project.
- Passwords cannot be shared and must be changed immediately after a suspected compromise. Users are required to notify Northwestern IT via quest-help@northwestern.edu in the event of a compromise.
- Project Sponsors and Leads are responsible for notifying Northwestern IT when user accounts should be deactivated due to the departure of any project member or termination of the project. If the Project Sponsor leaves the University, the Project Lead or Manager must identify a new Project Sponsor.
- All software used on Northwestern HPC systems, including open-source software, must be used in accordance with applicable license terms and conditions. Possession or use of illegally pirated software is not permitted.
- The Project Sponsor and Lead must ensure that Northwestern University’s HPC resources are only used to store data that is not subject to regulatory or compliance requirements, including but not limited to: HIPAA (Health Information Portability and Accountability Act), FISMA (Federal Information Security Management Act), Personal Information Protection Act of Illinois, or any other restrictions on data handling as required by research grants and projects. See the Data Storage Policy below and Quest Data Security Guidance for more details.
- Scheduled maintenance on Quest is typically announced to active users of Quest via the quest-announce email listserv a minimum of seven days in advance of a downtime. Planned maintenance will be announced 30 days in advance if the work requires downtime, in which job queues are completely drained.
- Unexpected maintenance or downtime may occur due to unforeseen circumstances. If you are unable to reach Quest, visit the Status of University IT Services for up-to-date information.
- Users are prohibited from accessing information by unauthorized means, accessing private data, performing denial of service actions, engaging in malicious activities that disrupt the University’s HPC services or systems, or interfering with other users’ access to Northwestern HPC system resources.
- Quest is not intended for private use and may only be used for Northwestern University research or classroom activities through research or classroom resources.
- Quest storage is for active work that requires computation on Quest. It may not be used for long-term or archival data storage.
Data Storage Policy
Quest has three storage locations that are meant to be used for different purposes. This document describes the policies that are in effect to provide the best experience for all Quest users and to optimize storage utilization for active research. For information about the tools and best practices to manage these Quest storage locations, please refer to File Systems and Storage on Quest.
Note that Quest is not approved for the storage of sensitive or regulated data. See Quest Data Security Guidance for further details.
Home Directories
Home directories are intended to store research-related files for individual users, such as job submission scripts or locally installed software. The following policies apply to home directories:
- Home directories are backed up via daily snapshots. Deleted files may be recovered within 6 days by submitting a service request to quest-help@northwestern.edu.
- Users cannot exceed their home directory 80 GB quota.
- Quest users are granted exclusive access to storage space in the home directory and should not grant access to any other user. Files shared with other users on Quest should be stored in project or scratch directories.
- Home folders will be deleted if a user’s NetID expires or a user has been inactive on Quest for six months. Users are considered inactive when a user is no longer associated with any active Quest resources. An inactive user will have access to Quest for three months if their Northwestern NetID remains active. After six months without being associated with an active resource, the home folder of the inactive user will be deleted.
Project Directories
Project directories are meant to store files such as data, analysis scripts, or locally installed software that are shared among users of associated Quest storage resources. The following policies apply to project directories.
- Project directories do not have back ups nor snapshots, and deleted files cannot be recovered.
- Users cannot exceed the storage limit of their project directory.
- Project directories associated with General Access storage are restricted to 50 million files and folders.
- Data stored in the project space will be deleted 90 days after the storage resource expires. If the same resource is renewed within the 90-day period, no data will be deleted.
- For a storage resource with multiple increments, such as distinct purchases, the total storage quota will be reduced by the expired increment upon its expiration date. If the storage utilization exceeds the new, smaller quota, users will not be able to write data to project space until utilized storage is reduced below the new quota. Consequently, if an application tries to write data to an already full project directory, it will fail to run.
- If the utilized storage still exceeds the new quota after 90 days, the storage resource will be locked. Then, an automated process will delete the oldest files until the utilized storage is less than the quota.
- Example: if 2 TB of 30 TB storage expires, the storage quota will be reduced to 28 TB. If the data occupies 29 TB, storage users are responsible for removing at least 1 TB of data to be within the current quota before jobs can start writing to project directory.
- Purchasing a Priority Access node on Quest automatically grants access to storage on the node's local disk. When the term of ownership for a node ends, the local storage on the node will be deleted.
Quest Scratch Space
Quest scratch directories are intended for short-term storage of large amounts of data, such as temporary files generated by running jobs or during large data transfers.
The following policies apply to scratch space:
- Scratch directories do not have backups nor snapshots. Deleted files cannot be recovered.
- Users are granted access to Quest’s scratch space upon gaining access to an active compute resource (General Access or Priority Access).
- Scratch space is assigned to individuals rather than groups.
- Access to scratch space expires with a user’s active compute resources. If a user no longer has access to an active Quest compute resource, their scratch directory will be set to read-only. Users will retain ready-only access to any data until the data is deleted as part of the regular scratch deletion schedule. To regain access to scratch space, users must renew their compute resource.
- Northwestern IT may adjust global scratch settings as necessary to manage scratch space and support availability for everyone. In such events, Quest scratch space users will receive a 5-day advance notice of any global changes. In normal operating conditions, Quest users may store up to 5 TB and up to 5 million files in their scratch directory. These settings cannot be modified on an individual user basis.
- In normal operating conditions, each file can be kept in scratch for up to 30 days after the last modification date of the file. Files that remain unedited or unchanged throughout the entire retention period will be automatically deleted via a continuous and automated purge process.
- Users are responsible for monitoring the age of their files through the system utilities and transferring data that must be preserved. There are no exceptions to the scratch space deletion policy.
- Files that need to be kept longer than 30 days must be moved out of scratch and into the user's project or home directory or transferred to other storage services.
- Users who run “touch” or similar commands for the purpose of altering their files' timestamps to circumvent file deletion beyond 30 days may have their access to Quest scratch space revoked.
- Users should delete files from scratch space promptly. Quest scratch space is a shared resource and should be used conscientiously by deleting files when they are no longer needed.
Job Submission Policies and Guidelines
Researchers should limit the number of individual job submissions to fewer than 2,500 at any given time. Researchers looking to submit a larger number of jobs than this should make use of the job array functionality of the job scheduler.
There are various factors affecting job scheduling, including the resources requested for the job. Submitted jobs should aim to only request needed resources. This increases the efficiency of computing resources available to all researchers, as well as reducing climate impact. Please see guidance on requesting CPU and memory resources for jobs.
General Access jobs can run on the majority of purchased Priority Access Quest nodes for up to 4 hours when spare capacity exists. This significantly increases the resources available for General Access use. General Access users will experience the shortest wait times when running jobs requesting 4 hours or less.