Computational Resources Abuse

[Artur Dubrawski]

Thank you Predrag.

Team:

I have authorized Predrag to take active measures needed to restore
civilized manners of usage of our computing resources.
These measures may include termination of processes, removal of data, and
escalate to termination of the most offending user accounts.

I am quite sad we have to go this way, given that over the past two
decades, perhaps even longer, we did not even have to discuss
these kinds of issues at all. We have been enjoying a friendly, respectful,
civilized culture of using the always scarce resources.

But we cannot afford to allow a few rogue processes or users handcuff the
rest of the lab anymore.

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns, and whenever in
doubt - do not hesitate to contact me, Predrag, or Jeff.

Thanks,
Artur

On Tue, Sep 1, 2020 at 5:41 PM Predrag Punosevac <predragp at andrew.cmu.edu>
wrote:

> 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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