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A Research Computing account allows you to login to our Linux compute servers using your Dartmouth NetID. Your home directory on the Linux systems is your own 50GB volume in DartFS. Accounts are available to any member of the Dartmouth community. You may also access your DartFS home directory from your desktop, laptop, etc. For information about sponsoring non-Dartmouth collaborators see the link in the Related Articles section.
Applying for a Research Computing account
To request an account, go to https://rcweb.dartmouth.edu/accounts/. Once your account is created, you will receive an email message with some more information.
Mounting your DartFS home on a personal computer
Research Computing accounts come with a 50GB DartFS home directory which is shared across all Research Computing Linux systems (Polaris, Andes, and the Discovery cluster). Home directories can also be directly mounted from a personal computer as long as it is on the Dartmouth network (or running the Dartmouth VPN). See the links in the Related Articles for detailed instructions on mounting from Mac and Windows.
Home directories names are your NetID but are further grouped according to the last letter of your NetID. So if Professor Charles Xavier's NetID were f1234x5 then his home directory would be in 5/f1234x5. All home directories start with /dartfs-hpc/rc/home/ so his full path (on the Linux systems) would be /dartfs-hpc/rc/home/ 5/f1234x5
Here are what the mount paths would look like for Prof. Xavier on Mac and Windows respectively.
Mac Finder path: smb://KIEWIT.DARTMOUTH.EDU\netid@dartfs-hpc.dartmouth.edu/rc/home/5/f1234x5
Windows UNC path: \\dartfs-hpc.dartmouth.edu\rc\home\5\f1234x5
Discovery
The Discovery cluster is a scheduled resource meaning that you do not run jobs directly on the cluster. Instead you submit jobs to the scheduler which then decides when and where to run them. For more information about that process, please read https://services.dartmouth.edu/TDClient/1806/Portal/KB/ArticleDet?ID=132625 and https://rc.dartmouth.edu/index.php/discoveryhpc/.
Disk Quotas
Disk quotas are limits on how much storage a storage volume can consume. These quotas are imposed on all DartFS volumes to protect against any one user or program using more than their fair share of this limited resource. Home directory quotas are fixed at 50GB. Additional volumes can be purchased at https://rcweb.dartmouth.edu/storagerequests/ Note: All faculty are entitled to a 1TB "lab volume" to facilitate their research. There is no charge for that first TB.
The command to check your quota on any system is quota [directory].
If you think you are out of disk space, follow the steps below.
- Make sure you are out of disk space by using the quota command.
- Remove any unnecessary files.
- Compress any unused files (note: gzip often works better than compress):
- To compress a single file named data1, use compress data1 or gzip data1.
- To compress all files in a directory that have the string data in their name, use compress *data* or gzip *data*.
- To compress all files in a sub-directory named old_data, use find ./old_data -type f -exec compress {} \; or find ./old_data -type f -exec gzip {} \;.
Website
Home directories can be used to host a website. URLs are of the form https://rcweb.dartmouth.edu/homes/netid/ though we can alias the netid to something else upon request. These are created on a first come, first served basis and we reserve the right to deny requests for specific names. Please email research.computing@dartmouth.edu to enable this feature
Nicknames
Nicknames can be requested for use in addition to a NetID when logging into the Research Computing Linux systems. For example, Charles Xavier might ask for "cxavier" so that his processes in the "top" program are more recognizably his. Nicknames only change your username on the Linux systems. They cannot be used when mounting home directories from personal computers and have nothing to do with website aliases (except that it is nice if they are the same). Again, these are first come, first served and subject to our approval. Please email research.computing@dartmouth.edu to enable this feature.
Password-less logins
Because of the way NetID authentication works, SSH key pairs cannot be used for logins. There is a somewhat similar mechanism for passwordless logins called GSSAPI authentication which is compatible with NetID logins. https://services.dartmouth.edu/TDClient/1806/Portal/KB/ArticleDet?ID=89203