Computational Resources Abuse

[Predrag Punosevac]

Dear Autonians,

It has been brought to my attention by the Auton Lab director Dr. Dubrawski
that many of senior lab members are taken aback and frustrated by the abuse
of computational resources and the lack of netiquette by some junior
members of our lab. This abuse has resulted in significant productivity
loss and will no longer be tolerated.

The access to the Auton lab computing resources is a privilege which comes
with the responsibilities to the other 131 members of our scientific group.
The Lab currently has 132 active accounts which is more than the NREC.  At
the very least we should be mindful that the other lab members, many of
whom you have never met in person, are working as hard as we do on moving
the frontier of human knowledge forward. The current ladies'/gentlemen's
agreement we had in place for the past 27 years

https://www.autonlab.org/autonlab_wiki/aetiquette.html

username: auton
password: Dr.Who

enabled us to manage high productivity and low user's frustration in spite
of having one of the most liberal usage policies on the CMU campus.

We would like to keep it that way and avoid technical solutions like SLURM
workload manager which will significantly raise the entry bar for incoming
students. We would also like to avoid heavy-handed policing of lab
resources. Both Dr. Dubrawski and I grew up in countries ruled by
totalitarian governments. We have personal experience with police states
which goes beyond reading 1984, Animal farm, or Archipelago and don't want
any resemblance with the Auton Lab experience.

As of this very moment, we expect that everyone is very familiar with the
above document. In particular sections Auton Lab etiquette

https://www.autonlab.org/autonlab_wiki/aetiquette.html

username: auton
password: Dr.Who

Users who are found in violation of don'ts will lose access to the Auton
Lab resources until the case is reviewed by the Lab's director and
co-director. This account suspension could be made permanent pending the
severity of the violation.

On a personal note, anybody who is caught holding GPU resources by running
fake jobs should start looking for another cluster for their work. I also
expect people to clear scratch directories at once.

Most Kind Regards,
Predag Punoseavc
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