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 or other approved educational activities 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. All use of that access must be directly related to that PI’s research.
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. Please see our Security Statement.
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 one year after account expiration. You are also required to log into the Unity portal once every six months to keep your account active. If you are a PI, you are required to check the members of your PI group to certify that they are all actively working in your research group and still need Unity access for that purpose. Please see our Unity Account Expiration and Deletion Policy.
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 100GB 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 should immediately report any known or suspected security breach or loss or misuse of Unity access keys or other credentials to hpc@umass.edu.
14. Users will comply with all applicable laws and regulations of their respective institutions and countries, including but not limited to intellectual property laws.
15. There may be other policies pertaining to the usage of Unity or the discussion thereof that users may also need to adhere to.
16. Logged information, including information provided by you for registration purposes, is used for administrative, operational, accounting, monitoring and security purposes. This information may be disclosed, via secured mechanisms, only for the same purposes and only as far as necessary to other organizations cooperating with Unity.
17. The Unity team reserves the right to terminate jobs that are overly disruptive or in violation of these policies. Notification of termination and the reasons why will be provided.

The Unity Team thanks you for adhering to these policies as closely as possible and reserves the right to restrict access to any individual or group found to be in breach of said policies. If you have any questions, you can reach out to hpc@umass.edu.