Terms and conditions

Usage rules

Access to the MetaCentrum grid computing infrastructure is free of charge for members of academic and non-commercial Czech research institutions with research or educational objectives. If you are interested in using our infrastructure for partial commercial research purposes, please get in touch with us in advance to discuss whether your research project can be conducted at MetaCentrum. Please note that the use of MetaCentrum for purely commercial activities is strictly prohibited, and computing resources cannot be provided for a fee. Foreign colleagues and collaborators who are not affiliated with a Czech research institution can also use the MetaCentrum computing capacity, but only by prior arrangement.

MetaCentrum services are available on a “best effort” basis. The operator strives to maintain the availability and security of the service, with essential services running in high-availability mode and automatically monitored. Support is available during the standard working hours.

For a complete description of the service, please refer to the MetaCentrum NGI pages, where you can also find the full terms of use.

Account prolongation

User accounts expire annually on February 2nd. Users are notified via email by the end of December/beginning of January to request account renewal and fill out a short summary.

If the account is not renewed by February 2nd, it will expire and become hidden. However, the data and login details will still exist and can be reactivated by submitting a renewal application. After a three-year grace period, expired accounts are deleted permanently without notification, along with all associated data.

Expired accounts can be renewed at any time during the year here.

Acknowledgements and publications

The user of MetaCentrum is obliged to use the following acknowledgement formula in all your publications created with the support of MetaCentrum, CERIT-SC and/or Elixir CZ. Please fill in citations of your publications in our system, you will get privileged access to all resources of MetaCentrum, CERIT-SC and/or ELIXIR CZ centre as a bonus.

 

Research group annual report

We ask research groups to send us the annual report for the past year by the end of January. The report should include:

1. Name of the group, contact address
2. List of the group members
3. Summary of the group’s research interests
4. Hardware contributed to Metacentrum (if any)
5. Most often used Metacentrum software
6. New software developed (if any)
7. List of research projects that used Metacentrum resources together with a short annotation
8. List of publications with acknowledgement to Metacentrum/CERIT-SC

Accepted languages are English and Czech. The report can be in any file format. The E-mail address for sending the report is annual-report@metacentrum.cz.

Security

The secure and effective utilization of MetaCentrum resources is possible only if some operational rules are fulfilled. Study the security rules for work in MetaCentrum and the network really carefully.

1. Users have to protect their account by a non-trivial Kerberos password. The password must not be shared. The password must not be used in open (non-encrypted) protocols as is, e.g. standard unic (non-Kerberized) telnet or ftp.

2. Non-trivial password is such that it can not be deduced (even after simple mutations) from the data known about the account owner and that is not a name of a person, animal or object (even after simple mutations). The administrators are authorized to perform tests to look for non-trivial passwords; in the case of positive results, they will inform the account owner in a secure way. Following that, the account owner has to change the password immediately (the original account can be locked until the time of password change).

3. Users are not allowed to share their accounts. If it is necessary to share the account due to some reasons (e.g. software installation), it has to be done using Kerberos (i.e. through the “.k5login” file), and it should also be discussed with specific administrators.

4. If the password is compromised, it is necessary to change it as soon as possible - see How to change your password.

5. Usage of non-secured protocols, telnet, FTP, etc., at other machines is not recommended as well. If this authentication method is used, one has to take into account the lower security level of the specific accout (and disclosure of the password in open form transferred by the network). It is forbidden to use such an account to log in to MetaCentrum through Kerberos or SSH protocol due to the danger of security breach using a weakly secured account followed by usage of fake ssh or fake Kerberos with a trojan horse and, consequently, the danger of breach of MetaCentrum accounts.

6. Strange behaviour of your account, appearance or disappearance of files, unknown processes running under your identity and so on have to be necessarily reported to the administrators of MetaCentrum.

7. Users are solely responsible for setting the required access rules to control the access to their data. N.B., users’ home directories are by default readable to all Metacentrum users. If you want to ensure other users cannot enter your home directory, you must change its access rights.