Skip to main content

FarmShare Policies

Overview

This document outlines the conditions of use for the FarmShare computers run by University IT. First and foremost, all use of these machines is covered by the policies set forth in Stanford University's Administrative Guide , which defines overall university computing policy.

If you are a student, the Fundamental Standard applies to your use of these systems. If you are faculty, staff, or a part-time worker (including a student employee), the University Code of Conduct applies to your use of these systems.

If you have any questions, please submit a Help ticket.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Rules for all Farmshare machines

These policies apply to the academic quarter, which is defined as starting on the first day of instruction on the Undergraduate Calendar and running though the last day of finals. Summer quarter (the longest of the Summer terms available) is included.

Note: There may be individual machines, or classes of machines, that are excluded from these limits. These exceptions will be noted in each machine's login message, also known as the “Message of the Day” (motd).

  • These resources may not be used for commercial purposes.
  • Users are not allowed to try to gain unauthorized access into any computer, nor are users allowed to test for system vulnerabilities.  Users also may not use these systems for making such attempts against other systems within, or outside of, Stanford.
  • The "/tmp" space on each system is for temporary storage. Around midnight, files that have not been touched for 24 hours get deleted automatically. Users are allowed to run programs that circumvent this automatic process (e.g., "tmptouch" scripts), but not for more than 2 weeks.
  • Users may not run distributed clients such as distributed.net, SETI@Home, or Folding@home, except by prior arrangement for a class.
  • Users may not run public servers, such as chat rooms or database servers, except by prior arrangement for a class.
  • Users may not run any program that debilitates the computer on which it is running or debilitates other systems. Examples of this include, but are not limited to:
    • Running a program that uses up most of the system memory.
    • Filling up the "/tmp" space on a system. Users should not be using more than a third of the available tmp space on a system.
    • Running a program that does heavy disk I/O and is writing files into the general AFS space. Use /tmp space for such programs, then copy any files you wish to keep into AFS space periodically, or when the program is done.
  • May not be used to transmit, store, or compute with Prohibited or Restricted Information, as defined by the Stanford University Data Classification criteria.

Additional rules for rice machines

  • During the regular academic quarter, users are limited to 10 concurrent CPU-intensive, or memory-intensive, programs. If you require more resources, please use the wheat machines.
    Examples of this include, but are not limited to, Matlab, SAS, gaussian, and many java programs.
Last modified