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, Allocations, and Security
The guidelines below are intended to ensure that Northwestern’s HPC facilities are shared fairly, 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 allocation along with the deletion and removal of all associated logins.
- Access to the HPC cluster (Quest) requires a valid Northwestern NetID. Researchers with affiliate and temporary NetIDs may access an allocation on Quest; however, the research project Principal Investigator (PI) or classroom instructor must be a Northwestern University employee (faculty, postdocs, and staff) or a fellow. Exceptions will be made to allow a graduate student to be the PI of the Quest allocation if there is no faculty, staff, or advisor associated with the research project or the student as a PI. Northwestern University employees (faculty, postdocs, and staff), fellows, and currently enrolled graduate students can act as Allocation Managers.
- Multiple allocations should not be requested for the same research project, such as each member of a research group requesting an individual allocation working on the same project. Instead, researchers should be added to an existing allocation or added in the original request.
- Passwords cannot be shared and must be changed immediately after a suspected compromise. Northwestern IT should be notified via quest-help@northwestern.edu in the event of a compromise.
- Allocation Managers or PIs are responsible for notifying Research Computing and Data Services when user accounts should be deactivated due to the departure of any allocation member or termination of the project. In the event that someone associated with an allocation leaves the University, the Allocation Manager or PI must remove data owned by the user within 3 months and if necessary, request that the stewardship of the data be moved to another user in the project, such as in the event the allocation manager or PI has left the University.
- With the exception of open-source software, all software used on Northwestern HPC systems must be licensed and used according to the licensing agreements. Possession and use of illegally pirated software is not permitted.
- The Principal Investigator or Allocation Manager 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 may not be used for private goals and may only be used for Northwestern University research activities or classroom activities through research or classroom allocations.
- Quest storage may only be used by researchers requiring computation on Quest. It may not be used as permanent storage for research not requiring computation on Quest.
Data Storage Policy
Quest has three different 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 restricted 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 when:
- A user’s NetID expires. Home directories associated with expired NetIDs may be deleted immediately.
- A user has been inactive on Quest for six months.
- Users who are not associated with an active allocation are considered inactive users. 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 allocation, 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 allocations. The following policies apply to project directories.
- Project directories are not backed up, and deleted files cannot be recovered.
- Users cannot exceed the storage limit of their project directory.
- General Access allocations are restricted to 50 million files and folders in their project directory.
- Data stored in the project space will be deleted 90 days after the allocation expires. If the allocation is renewed within the 90-day period, no data will be deleted.
- If part of the allocation’s storage expires, the allocation’s quota will shrink by the expired amount. If the allocation occupies more storage than the new, smaller allocation quota, you will not be able to write data to project space until you reduce the amount of storage used to be below the new quota. Consequently, if your application tries to write data to an already full allocation, it will fail to run.
- If the storage used exceeds the new quota within 90 days, the allocation will be locked. Then, an automated process will delete the oldest files until the storage used is less than the quota.
- Example: if 2 TB of 30 TB storage expires, the storage will shrink to 28 TB. If the allocation occupies 29 TB, the allocation users are responsible for removing at least 1 TB of storage to get back to the allocation limit before jobs can be run under the allocation.
- Purchasing a 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 data as temporary files from running jobs or large data transfers.
The following policies apply to scratch space:
- Scratch directories are not backed up. Deleted files cannot be recovered.
- Users apply to access Quest scratch space individually, as scratch space is assigned to individuals rather than by allocations.
- Access to scratch space expires with the user’s active allocation. If a user is no longer in any active Quest allocation, their scratch directory will be set to read-only. Once this happens, users will retain access to any data previously written into their Quest scratch directory until that data is deleted as part of the regular scratch deletion schedule. To regain access to scratch space, users must reapply for Quest scratch space access once they are in an active allocation.
- 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 will 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 they have spare capacity, which significantly increases the resource available for General Access use. General Access allocation users will experience the shortest wait times when running jobs requesting 4 hours or less of wall time.