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AI Agent Guidelines

These guidelines describe how to use AI agents, coding assistants and other autonomous tools responsibly on REANNZ HPC systems. They are advice, not policy. The Acceptable Use Policy still applies to everything an agent does under your account.

These guidelines do not cover AI or machine learning as the research workload itself.

See also: agent setup guides

Principles

  1. You are responsible for anything an agent does under your account, in the same way you are responsible for any other process you run.
  2. Understand the basics of operating an autonomous agent safely, such as the risks of supply chain attacks and prompt injection.
  3. Agents should follow the same shared-system etiquette expected of any other user process.
  4. Take reasonable precautions to protect the platform, other users and REANNZ when operating an agent.

Working on the cluster

  • When polling commands that use shared resources (filesystem operations, squeue, sacct), leave generous delays between calls, for example sleep 60 between squeue --me calls.
  • Run only one agent session at a time, unless support has agreed to more.
  • Use squeue --me and ps -u $USER to keep the agent's view limited to your own work.
  • If the agent runs off the cluster, do not give it your passwords, SSH keys, tokens or other sensitive information.
  • Do not expose an MCP server or open a reverse tunnel from a REANNZ HPC system outward. This includes tools such as ngrok, cloudflared, VS Code tunnels and remote-control features of AI tools. The Acceptable Use Policy does not allow tunnels that let connections from outside reach the cluster without logging in. An agent on your workstation connecting in to a service on the cluster is fine, but not the other way around. Tunnels within the cluster, such as forwarding a port from a compute node to a login node, are fine.
  • If an agent needs access to the cluster, apply to support for a service account: Contact our Support Team.
  • Under the Acceptable Use Policy, REANNZ can stop any process that disrupts the service, including agent processes.

Best Practice

Do

  • Scope status checks to your own work: squeue --me, sacct -j <jobid>, ps -u $USER.
  • Poll on the order of tens of seconds apart rather than in a tight loop.
  • Submit jobs in small, bounded batches, job-arrays or dependency chains (sbatch --dependency=afterok:...) instead of many independent submissions.
  • Point file operations (find, grep, du) at specific known paths rather than whole shared parent directories.
  • Run IO, CPU or memory heavy work as a job, not on the login node.
  • Give an agent a narrow working directory rather than broad filesystem access.
  • Review the packages or dependencies an agent proposes to install before it installs them, and pre-install where practical.

Don't

  • watch -n 1 squeue or while true; do squeue; sleep 1; done, sub-second polling of the scheduler.
  • sacct --allusers -S <date> full-cluster accounting queries.
  • Unscoped recursive find/grep -r over /nesi/project, /home or similar shared filesystems.
  • for i in {1..N}; do sbatch job.sh; done speculative bursts of job submissions while iterating.
  • top/ps aux refreshed continuously and unfiltered across all users.

Support

REANNZ does not provide support for third-party AI tools. Before raising a support ticket, verify any commands an agent has generated against the relevant documentation, and check that nothing has been hallucinated.

An unofficial AI skill for responsible operation of the REANNZ HPC can be found at nesi-support-skill.

Research Integrity

We recommend that use of AI in research conducted on REANNZ HPC systems follows the Royal Society guidelines.

See Also