Class Setup

For Professors

To request Mill resources for a class, please fill out the Class Request form. The minimum information required is the department, course name and number, and the name of the instructor of record. We prefer that requests be submitted by the instructor of record.

The form will be used to generate a memorandum of understanding (MOU) which will be signed by the instructor and IT. At this time, the instructor should prepare a class roster and a list of software needed for their course. Failure to do so may negatively affect class setup.

Once the MOU is signed, a netgroup for the class will be created. The instructor will be assigned as an admin for the netgroup and be given instructions to add students. They must add their class roster to the netgroup. Students who are not in a class netgroup will not be able to submit jobs to the class partition.

It will take ~2 hours from being added to the netgroup for students to be able to submit jobs. This delay is not compatible with registering students inside a single class period for use that class period.

Shared class storage is available for lease. For more information, please contact RSS at: itrss@mst.edu.

Note: Class netgroups will be deleted at the end of the next grading period. Classes should be renewed each time they are offered by following the above procedure.

For Students

Students should request a Mill account by filling out the Account Request Form. In addition to requesting an account, your professor must add you to the class netgroup before you can access the class partition.

If you cannot connect to the class partition for the first time, you can check for membership in the class by following the directions at the bottom of this article on managing netgroups. The Service Desk can also assist you in checking your netgroup membership.

For technical help, you can submit a request for Mill help. For all other questions, students should ask their professor/TA for assistance first.

Limitations

The Classes Partition

The class partition is a subset of nodes set aside for use in academic coursework at S&T. It is named rss-class within SLURM. Access requires students to be rostered in a class that is registered for Mill use by the professor. Students can access the Mill using SSH in a terminal or via the class OnDemand web portal. NOTE: this link will show an error until your instructor has added you to their mill-class group.

Limitations

To ensure access for all students, the Class partition has several limitations placed on it. These are:

• A maxiumum of 4 jobs may be sumbitted at any time. A maximum of 2 jobs may be running at any time.
• The maximum runtime for any job is limited to 4 hours.
• The maximum resources used per job are: 8 CPUs, 32G RAM, 1 V100 GPU.

Managing Netgroups

What is a Netgroup?

A netgroup is a group of accounts that is used on the Mill to control access to specific resources. In the context of Mill classes, each individual class has its own netgroup, named in the pattern rss-class-(Department)(Course#). A worked example of this pattern is rss-class-cs101. All individual class netgroups are part of the master rss-class netgroup, which confers access to the class partition and the class OnDemand web portal.

Managing the Group

Each individual class netgroup has the professor of record added as an admin. Professors are responsible for adding the class roster to the netgroup. If this is not done, students will not be able to access class resources on the Mill.

To add students to your class netgroup, access the Netgroup Tool. Filter the list by class, and select the course you wish to edit. (Note - you will likely have admin rights to far fewer netgroups, and may not even need to apply a filter.)

Then hit the "Add Members" button after highlighting your course. Multiple student usernames may be added at the same time by separating them with a comma (aabbcc, ddeeff, ...).

Members of the group can be reviewed by selecting "Display/Remove Members".

For Students - Checking Membership

To check group membership, you can access the Analyze User tool, or the Service Desk can assist you to check for you membership in a group. This is a good first step if you are having trouble accessing the Mill for the first time at the start of the semester.

From the main page, click into the value box for 'User ID (exact)', and enter your account ID. Then, hit enter.

Scroll down the page to 'memberOf' to see all groups you are in. 

If you are not a member of the class netgroups that you expect, please contact your professor for further assistance.