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This document remains on line for historical purposes only.
The information in it is no longer relevant.
Oct-31-2001.
Contents
Introduction
Accounts on Seqaxp
Conditions for use
- Charges
- Hardware Access
- Disk Space
- Software
- Courtesy
- Reliability
- Account changes
- SAF Unix machines
- Types of use
- Period of service
How to obtain an account
Fill out account application form
Older browsers may not be able to access the secure application
form. A simple
fix is availabe from the Thawte webserver.
The Biology Division's Sequence Analysis Facility (SAF)
will provide OpenVMS accounts to any campus user that wants
one, subject to the conditions described in this document.
Accounts will be made available on SEQAXP, a 2100 A500MP
with two processors and 192 Mb RAM, running OpenVMS/AXP.
This server class machine is much faster than any of the old
VMS machines that were in the Shakespeare cluster at CCO
(also most of the Unix ones).
Users who want access to our machine will have to abide by
these conditions:
Sorry folks, there's no free lunch. Since we cannot charge
overhead we have to recover costs directly. We aren't
discriminating here - all of our current users already pay
the rate shown below. No account will be granted that is
not associated with a valid 5 digit institute charge number.
Charges are handled on a "by group" basis. That is, if
several members of a lab want accounts, all must request to
be placed in the same group and all charges will be applied
to a single 5 digit number.
-
- There is a $3.00/hour charge for connect time or batch job
time. Subprocesses are not charged. There is currently no
charge for disk space usage or pages printed. Inactive
telnet/lat/rlogin/cterm sessions are automatically logged
out by an idle job killer to prevent abandoned sessions from
racking up charges.
-
- There is a $3.00/hour charge for console time on the Unix
workstations. An idle job killer will log you out if there is no
keyboard activity for more than 20 minutes.
-
Example 1 User telnets in and reads mail and runs gopher for
exactly thirty minutes. User will be charged $1.50.
Example 2 User telnets in and reads mail and runs gopher for
30 minutes, then goes home for the day without logging out.
Idle job killer stops the process at about 20-25 minutes
after the last keystroke. User will be charged about $3.00.
Example 3 User telnets in and starts a batch job that runs
for one hour, then reads mail for one hour while it runs.
User is charged $6.00.
- Historically we have provided a few undergraduates with free
accounts for use in personal biology projects, and will
continue to do so. However, we will not provide free
accounts for general use by undergraduates, nor will we
charge undergraduate accounts. If undergraduates wish to
use the machine they will have to lobby the institute to
make some arrangement to cover them.
Other sites charge too!
No physical access to the console, tape drives, or other
hardware will be provided. CDROMS or 8mm tapes can be
mounted on request. (We've only got a single 8mm
tape drive, and that is needed every night for backups.)
Print queues to Unix machines (via lpr) and laser printers
(via ethertalk) will be set up on request so that print jobs
can go to users' local printers. At least
initially, we will block access to the system printer for
nonbiology users. The problem is that we have no public
access area where nonbiology users could pick up their print
outs, and we certainly don't have the time to mail them all!
We will try to get set up access to a printer at CCO, which
will be set up as the default printer for general users.
The amount of disk space allotted will depend somewhat upon the
number of nonbiology users. Currently we are using a 5000 block disk
quota. Larger diskquotas will be available by specific request.
Much larger disk space allocations will have to be negotiated.
Users will have access to all of the software that is
currently installed - they will not be limited to just the
standard OpenVMS tools. Users may not have access
to some software with usage restricted licenses (none of
which is currently installed.) Since only an AXP will be
available users will have to deal with rebuilding or VESTing
their personal VAX software, if any.
The primary function of this machine is to support the
biology division. Users will be requested to behave nicely,
ie, not run CPU intensive jobs from the command line and so
forth. Users who do not behave nicely and so become a pain
in the rear will be barred from further use.
Seqaxp is a single machine, and so cannot provide the
failover protection a multimachine cluster offers.
While Seqaxp is quite reliable, it will need to be out
of service from time to time for various types of
maintenance. (Incoming mail will not be lost when this
happens - it will be spooled for delivery elsewhere.)
Several days warning will be provided for planned
maintenance.
-
- The machine is covered by a 5 day/week, 24 hour response
time service contract. We cannot guarantee a time to
availability following a major hardware failure, but
expect that it would not be more than 48 to 72 hours.
Account additions/changes will be handled as expeditiously
as possible. If the 5 digit charge code you provide expires
please try to notify us *before* it causes accounting
problems!
General users will not have access to the SAF's Unix machines,
which are reserved for classwork and research in structural biology.
These accounts may be used for any sort of general or
research computing. However, use for biological research
always has the highest priority.
The SAF reserves the right to terminate this service, or
change the conditions of use. Neither shall take place
unless users have been given at least three months advance
warning, barring acts of God etc.
The easiest way, is to click here and
fill out the form that results. Or, you can send send e-mail to
account@seqaxp.bio.caltech.edu
The subject line doesn't matter, but each message should
consist of a message formatted like:
- USERNAME=johndoe
- GROUP=mygroup
- FULLNAME=John Q. Doe
- CHARGE=12345
- CHARGE_NAME=Albert Einstein
- DIVISION=Chemistry
- STATUS=Grad. Student
- EMAIL=johndoe@cco
- PASSWORD=whatever
- PHONE=1234
Where:
USERNAME
Preferred account name. Finger username@seqaxp
first to see if it is free. Generally, make this the same
as your current CCO account, if you have one. Restrict the
name to eight characters.
-
- Otherwise, best if it matches other campus accounts,
such as one of the CCO Unix machines or your own machines.
GROUP
Preferred name for your group. Must be 8
characters or less. Must not match any
USERNAME. Suggestion, if the P.I. has USERNAME
FRED then make this FRED_GRP or FRED_G.
FULLNAME
User's full name.
CHARGE
Five digit institute charge number to be billed.
Use only one CHARGE per GROUP.
CHARGE_NAME
The full name of the person responsible for
this charge number, generally a P.I. or
administrator.
DIVISION
Institute division user is in.
EMAIL
An e-mail address to contact about the account.
PASSWORD
What you want the initial password to be.
Remember it, you'll need it to log in the first
time!
PHONE
Campus extension to call if problems arise.
Neither the order of these records nor their case matters.
Don't put in any extra spaces beyond what is shown
above. Each e-mail message must be for a single user.
These account requests will be accumulated, name and group
conflicts resolved, consistency between charge, division,
and charge_name verified. You may be contacted by e-mail or
phone if it is necessary to resolve name conflicts or
account problems.
Ideally, we would like to process the initial group of
transferred accounts in one batch.