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User Accounts and Access

User accounts are available for all University of Miami, faculty, staff and students. Please visit the accounts application page to request an account.

Logging In:

Users with active accounts may access the Kronos cluster by logging on via SSH to the "kronos.ccs.miami.edu" login node.

For example, 

$ ssh user@kronos.ccs.miami.edu
user@kronos.ccs.miami.edu's password:

NOTE: Windows users will require a SSH Client application to access the CCS Machines. A simple and free client is PUTTY available from www.putty.org.

Please note that each user is allowed to have up to 10 processes and each process can use up to 1G memory on kronos login node. Also, you will be logged out of the machine after 5 hours of idle time.

Home Environment, Storage and Data Transfers

Operating System, Shells, Editors & Tools

The operating system on kronos cluster is Redhat Linux Version 2.6.18-53.el5. The popular shell, Bash, is the default login shell but other shells are available. Contact user support to change your default login shell. Both vi(Vim) and Emacs editors are available.

Storage

All active users are allocated three logical storage areas, HOME, WORKDIR and ARCHIVE. Storage quotas are not implemented at the user level but rather at the PI level. Each PI is allocated 100 G for HOME, 250G for WORKDIR and 1 TB for ARCHIVE directories. The PI is responsible for the management of storage within his/her group. Home directories are intended primarily for basic account information, source codes etc. WORKDIR should be used for compiles and run-time input and output files. Both HOME and WORKDIR are available on all nodes of the cluster. The ARCHIVE directory is meant for temporary storage of results and may not be available from all nodes. ALL data is in the WORKDIR backed up but untouched data older than 3 weeks is subject to purging. Table 5 summarizes the CCS storage allocations for the Linux cluster.

Table 5: Summary of default CCS storage allocation
Name Purpose Quota/PI Purge Policy Back Up Policy Free Service
HOME small files, codes etc. 100 GB not purged not backed up Yes
WORK compilation, run-time files 250 GB purged backed up Yes
ARCHIVE long-term storage 1 TB not purged not backed up No


Transferring Files & Data

Secure copy (SCP) and secure FTP (SFTP) are the preffered means to transfer file and data between CCS and local machines. For example: 

userid1@localhost$ scp file.tar userid2@kronos.ccs.miami.edu:.
userid2@kronos.ccs.miami.edu's password:
file.tar 100% |*******************************| 120 00:00
userid1@localhost$