Introduction

The Q&CE IT infrastructure is mainly focussed on supporting the current research at the Q&CE department. If you need support information for your personal computer, please visit the General IT Support section.

User Account

To use the servers and application software of the Q&CE IT infrastructure, you need to a Q&CE user account. You can apply for a user account if you are a staff member, PhD student, or MSc student with a project in the Q&CE department. If you comply to these rules, you can send a mail to the Q&CE System Administrator with your application. Please add the following information to your application:

  • Full Name
  • NetID
  • TU Delft E-mail address
  • Your Supervisor (for PhD and MSc students)

If your application is approved, the account will be created and you will receive a mail with your account information.

Usage Rules and Guidelines

The main usage rule is: Respect your fellow users!

The compute cluster is primarily meant to run large time consuming jobs and the application and project servers are meant for running interactive applications and simulations. There is only a limited number of application/project servers and cluster nodes, each with limited resources, and they are shared between everybody in the department. You have to share the available resources fairly and make sure you don’t unnecessarily hinder other users.

The following guidelines will help you follow this rule, and provide some practical hints:

  • Check the load and memory usage on the application/project server before you start your own job. Starting jobs on a fully loaded server will result in a severe performance loss and sometimes terminating applications due to memory allocation problems.
  • Do not use all the resources availabe on an application or project server or the cluster. Even if the machines look idle, there can be someone who wants to start a job in 5 minutes. As a rule of thumb, do not use more then a quarter of the available resources. Most multi-threaded applications (such as Java and Matlab) will automatically use all cpu cores of a server, and thus take away processing power from other jobs. If you can specify or limit the number of threads, set it to at most 25% of the cores in that application server, so this leaves enough processing capacity for other users. On some application servers the resource usage is limited by the operting system
  • Actively monitor the status of your jobs and the load of the application/project servers. Make sure your job runs normally and is not in the way of other jobs. Check the following at the start of a job and thereafter at least twice a day:
    • If your job is not working correctly (or halted) because of a program (or programming) error, terminate it immediately and debug and fix the problem instead of just trying again.
    • Use the top command to monitor the cpu (%CPU) and memory (%MEM) usage of your job. If either is too high, kill your job so it doesn’t cause problems for other jobs. Don’t leave top running unless your are continuously watching it, because top command uses cpu resources too. You can press q to quit top.

If you do NOT comply to this rules and guidelines, your jobs can be terminated without notice, so keep an eye on your applications and simulations.

Thank you for your cooperation.

General IT Support

The IT support of your personal computer is carried out by the central IT department. If you need information about supported services like:

  • Wireless Networks (EduRoam and TUvisitor access)
  • VPN access
  • Printing/Scanning/Copying
  • E-Mail
  • Linux Bastion host (for remote access to linux servers and workstations)

and many other subjects, you can find a lot of answers on the ICT manuals page of the TU Delft SSC-ICT department.

If you need a specific service (i.e. software install) or have a problem with your personal computer, you can login to the Selfservice Portal with your NetID and use the “Report to Service Desk” option to report your problem or request to the Service Desk.

If you have specific needs for your research, you can send a mail to the Q&CE System Administrator with your request…