Welcome & Onboarding

Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Lab (AIRLab) at Politecnico di Milano. This handbook is your starting point. Read it carefully before touching any shared resource.

Before You Start

Before you can connect to anything, make sure you have obtained the following from your co-supervisor:

Item	How to get it
Building 7 access	Register as an AIRLab user at Life@AIRLab
VPN access	Ask your co-supervisor to send a VPN access request to the department ICT. Then, follow this guide to setup Global Protect
Server credentials (username + temporary password)	Ask your co-supervisor for the temporary password. The server username is your surname
AIRLab Discord server invite	Ask your co-supervisor for a single-use invite link
Resource booking spreadsheet links	Ask your co-supervisor for the specific resource booking links

Server Infrastructure

AIRLab operates two GPU compute servers and one NAS (Network-Attached Storage). All servers are located in the DEIB server room at Building 20. You interact with them remotely — from the AIRLab LAN at Building 7, or from anywhere via VPN.

Host	Role	GPUs	CPU cores	RAM
westworld	Compute	8 × 11 GB NVIDIA 1080 Ti	40	252 GB
elysium	Compute	4 × 24 GB RTX 6000 · 1 × 12 GB Titan X · 1 × 11 GB 1080 Ti	48	252 GB
megaverse	Storage	—	—	—

Directory Layout

Each user has a home directory on every compute server. Most of the subdirectories are symlinks pointing to your personal space on megaverse so that files are accessible from all machines:

/home/lastname/ (on any compute server)

text

/home/lastname/
├── ...
└── storage    → /megaverse/storage/lastname/      ← put your code and datasets here

Keep your home directory itself light. Use ~/storage/ for project code, large datasets, and model checkpoints.

Home quota. The home directory (~) has a hard quota of 20 GB. Exceeding it prevents saving files — including experiment outputs — which can corrupt a running job. Check usage with ncdu -x ~.

Getting Access

Your co-supervisor will create a Linux account for you. Your username follows the convention lastname (all lowercase). Verify your login:

local machine

bash

# IP addresses are internal — ask your co-supervisor for them
ssh lastname@<server ip>

Your password is set to expire on first login and you will be prompted to choose a new one. If not, or to change it later:

westworld

bash

passwd
# Enter current (temporary) password, then your new password twice

After logging in, switch to SSH key authentication to avoid typing passwords. See the SSH in the Shell guide.

Core Responsibilities

Every AIRLab member is expected to uphold the following practices from day one.

Responsibility	What it means in practice
Use Docker for all experiments	Never install Python packages globally with `pip install`. All code runs inside a container built from your project's `Dockerfile`.
Book resources before using them	Reserve CPU cores and GPUs via the shared booking spreadsheet before starting any experiment. See Resource Booking below.
Respect storage limits	Your home directory is capped at 20 GB. Most of your files should go in `~/storage/`.
Version your code on Git	All project code must live in a private GitHub repository with your co-supervisors added as members.
Document your work	Every project must have a `README.md` that a stranger could use to reproduce your results from scratch.

If you are ever unsure whether something is allowed, ask your co-supervisor. The shared infrastructure depends on mutual respect.

Resource Booking

All CPU cores and GPUs must be reserved before use. Each server has its own booking spreadsheet — ask your co-supervisor for the links. When booking:

Reserve only what your experiment actually needs. Booking 8 GPUs for a single-GPU job wastes shared resources.
Set a realistic end time. If your job finishes early, release the reservation immediately.
Never book more than three days in advance — implement proper checkpointing instead so jobs can be paused and resumed.