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Terms and Conditions

All use of Advanced Research Computing platforms including the DSH Research Compute environment are subject to the general UCL Computing Regulations.

DSH services are also subject to the Information Governance procedure and rationale policy and the UCL Information Security Management System (ISMS) policies for Trusted Research Environments.

Commercial Services

It is not permitted to provide commercial services from your account on our systems.

Impairing Other Users

All DSH HPC Cluster nodes are intended for shared use among multiple users, and we ask that you please be mindful of your resource usage, especially with regard to home directory storage and applications running on the login nodes. We monitor the load on cluster nodes to ensure suitable operation for all users, and we may on occasion terminate running processes or remove running or queued jobs without warning if they impair the availability of shared resources for other users.

Access Suspension

If you:

  • are subject to a UCL disciplinary procedure,
  • or breach UCL's Computing Regulations,
  • or are suspected to have shared your access credentials,
  • or are suspected to be involved in a security incident,

We may raise this with relevant UCL teams1 and suspend your access to services until any relevant processes have been completed.

Your Data

Machines in the DSH Research Compute environment have some data storage capability, but it should not be treated as the sole repository for your data. We do not actively back up user data. Outages and data-loss events will be handled on a best-effort basis within normal UCL working hours.

Transferring Data Ownership

You may contact us to arrange to transfer ownership of your data on a service to another user, with their consent. Please arrange this before you stop being a user.

Data Access by Support Staff

We will not access your data without your consent under any circumstances.

Data Retention

Data Retention on Leaving UCL

We intend to retain user data for 180 days after a user has either left UCL, requested that their account be removed, had their institution request that their account be removed, or become ineligible for an account in some other way.

This process is not currently automated, so data may still be retained after this time. Please contact us if you need to ensure your data has been erased.

Backup Retention

The DSH HPC cluster does not perform back-up of any data.

Acknowledgement in Works

We request that you acknowledge the use of the DSH services in any publications describing research that has used them, in any part. The following words should be used:

"The authors acknowledge the use of the UCL Data Save Haven (DSH), and associated support services, in the completion of this work".

Or analogous terminology for other services.

  1. I.e. the Information Security Group, or Human Resources. ↩