Accounts and logging in

How do I request an O2 account?

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All cluster logins from outside the HMS network require two-factor authentication. For more details, please reference Two Factor Authentication on O2 and Two Factor Authentication FAQ. Please contact us if you are having trouble with two-factor authentication on O2. 

Please do NOT send us or anyone else your password. Ever. We can assist you without knowing your password, and sharing accounts on the cluster is prohibited by Harvard security policy.

If you're having difficulty logging in to O2, make sure you're using your HMS account (in lowercase) and HMS account password to log in. If that does not resolve the problem, you can reset your HMS account password. Contact the HMS IT Service Desk (itservicedesk@hms.harvard.edu, or 617-432-2000) if you're unable to login to the HMS account management website. Your HMS account may have been locked due to too many failed login attempts to the O2 cluster. Once you are able to login to the HMS account management site, wait 1 hour and try logging in to O2 again. If you're still facing problems, then send in a ticket to us.

Files, Storage, Quotas

Where can I put my data?

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It depends. See Filesystems. Temporary filesystems (like the scratch filesystem in /n/scratch3scratch, or /tmp, which is a hard drive on individual compute nodes) are not backed up, and are occasionally purged of data. We strongly encourage you to use a backed-up filesystem for important data. Don't store the only copy of your data on your desktop unless it is reliably backed up. 

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See the Restoring backups section of Filesystems. As that section describes, IF the data was on a backed-up filesystem, you can actually restore the data yourself. If you run into trouble, contact Research Computing, and we'll do our best to help you. We strongly encourage you to use a backed-up filesystem for important data. For example, even Research Computing has no way to restore deleted data on the scratch3 scratch filesystem.

How do I get data to/from O2?

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Either of these problems can be due to going over the 100GiB quota in your home directory, or over the set quota in a shared group directory. Please read here for more information.

Why are jobs that exceed a partition's time limit killed instead of just being moved to a partition with a longer time limit?

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It means your jobs requested sizeable resources, most of which were not actually needed. Please check Improving O2 EfficiencyImproving O2 Efficiency by Changing User Priorityfor more information.

Specific Programs or Programming Languages

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