Unity Terms of Service

Unity is a High Performance Computing Cluster running Ubuntu Linux housed at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC). Unity is operated primarily by the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst), but is a joint project between many institutions, including the University of Rhode Island, and the Dartmouth, Boston, and Lowell UMass campuses.

This Acceptable Use Policy was written to clarify the terms under which Unity may be accessed and used and to help ensure fair and equitable access. Unity services are provided on shared resources. All use of Unity must adhere to the following guidelines. Accounts repeatedly violating these guidelines will have their Unity access disabled.

1. If you are from an academic institution, all uses of Unity must be directly related to non-commercial research at your home institution. If you are from a corporate partner, all uses of Unity must be authorized by that partner.
2. Granting of PI (research group lead) accounts is determined by the home institution’s policies.
3. If you do not qualify for a PI account, you can request to join a PI’s account, provided that you are working on their team. Access to that PI group is granted or denied solely by said PI.
4. Users are not permitted to run jobs on the login nodes. We reserve the right to terminate disruptive processes on the login nodes without notice.
5. Jobs submitted to the Unity cluster should request resources that are necessary for the job, as closely as possible. Jobs that request resources that then go unused may be terminated without advance notice, but you will be notified that your job was terminated and why.
6. Unity storage is not backed up at this time. Unity should not be the primary storage site for your data. Users are responsible for backing up their own data.
7. It is the responsibility of parties uploading data to Unity to ensure that any security and usage requirements attached to said data are met. For example, Unity is not an appropriate place for data that is subject to HIPAA requirements.
8. Your account on Unity is tied to your account at your home institution. When your account at your home institution expires, so does your Unity account. Your data will be deleted six months after account expiration.
9. Any data stored in /work or /project is owned by the PI associated with that directory. Any data stored in a user’s home directory is owned by that user.
10. Access to resources on Unity is determined per PI. Every PI account comes with 1TB of storage in /work. Every Unity account comes with 50GB of storage in said account’s home directory. Additional storage is available and policies vary by institution. Please see the storage documentation or contact the appropriate person at your member institution for details.
11. Users may not intentionally disrupt another user’s work, or attempt to “game the system” to gain access to additional resources.
12. Users may not share their access keys with other users.
13. Users will comply with all applicable laws and regulations of their respective institutions and countries.
14. There may be other policies pertaining to the usage of Unity or the discussion thereof that users may also need to adhere to.

The Unity Team thanks you for adhering to these policies as closely as possible. If you have any questions, you can reach out to hpc@umass.edu.