Policies

The SRCC follows and expects staff and users of our services to follow FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship. We also expect staff and users to understand and abide by all data management, access, and data sharing requirements imposed on any data stored in our environments by Duke University, federal agencies or by agreed upon Data Use Agreements between Duke and other institutions. These include, but are not limited to:

• Duke Data Security Policy and Data Classification Standards
• Duke Genomic Data Classification and Use
• Duke’s Compliance Policy
• NIH Genomic Data Sharing & Data Management and Sharing Policies
• Duke Data Retention
• NIH-Controlled Access Data (e.g., dbGAP)

NOTE: for NIH-controlled access data (such as dbGap data), staff and users will abide by the applicable policies re: access, removal and destruction of the data per the NIH .  This requires confirmation of data destruction by the Institutional Signing Official. Failure to submit a renewal or to complete a close-out process may result in suspension by the NI of the PI and all associated personnel and collaborators from submitting new access requests for a period of time.

OASIS RTS provides high-performance computing (HPC) resources for the benefit of the mission of the Duke School of Medicine, including research and education.  These resources include high-performance computing nodes (CPU and GPU), storage (computable and file storage), and research computing support services.

All users of the SRCC clusters must agree and abide by the following policies:

1. Researchers using OASIS RTS systems, including HPC systems, must comply with RTS usage and Duke Health security policies. These policies include adherence to quotas, queuing policies, security training, password policies, and account management policies. (https://security.duke.edu/policies-procedures-and-standards/)
2. All users must have a Duke Health Active Directory account.
3. You cannot share your NETID and password with another users.
4. Compute usage will be measured in compute hours. Storage usage will be measured in bytes. Usage will be tracked per user.
5. Consumption (usage) and any other services will be billed monthly to the approved fund code provided.
6. It is the responsibility of individual external users to cover the costs of their HPC usage and storage. External users may make arrangements for payments to be handled by their institution or through some other mechanism, but individual external users are ultimately responsible for ensuring coverage of the cost of their use.
7. Users of the cluster are responsible for the data they introduce to the clusters and must follow all applicable Duke (including IRB), school, and departmental policies on data management and data use.
8. Data storage on the cluster is restricted to active research. You should use other Duke data storage services suitable for your data classification to store your research data on a long-term basis. 
9. If you plan to submit a large number of jobs on the cluster and have never done this before, please contact the SRCC for guidance. Jobs that crash the scheduler will be deleted from the system and in some circumstances your access to the cluster may be suspended until this is resolved.
10. Researchers are requested to use the scratch storage space conscientiously by deleting files that they no longer need in as soon as they're done with them, rather than occupying storage unnecessarily.
11. Data stored on the SRCC cluster’s scratch space will be automatically removed for files that have not been accessed in 60 days. Researchers will receive an email notification one week prior to their files being deleted from the scratch space.  
12. Any files that need to be kept longer on the scratch space should be transferred to other storage services such as the DHTS Isilon file shares, AWS S3, or Azure Blob containers. 
13. Researchers may not run “touch” commands or similar commands for the purpose of altering their files' timestamps to circumvent this file deletion policy. SRCC will impose strict storage limits on researchers who violate this policy.   
14. Deliberate or inadvertent misuse of the cluster’s resources may result in your associated accounts being locked, your running jobs canceled, and your access to the cluster terminated.
15. Your email address will automatically be added to the SRCC HPC listservs when your account is created. You may unsubscribe yourself at any time; however, we recommend that you stay subscribed to receive critical announcements regarding service availability, maintenance, and updates.
16. Users of the cluster agree to only run jobs that relate to the research mission of Duke University. Use of the cluster for the following activities is prohibited:
    • Financial gain
    • Commercial or business use
    • Unauthorized use or storage of copyright-protected or proprietary resources
    • Unauthorized mining of data on or off campus (including many web scraping techniques)