NHR/HLRN Project Migration

Starting 2024/Q2, all NHR/HLRN new projects are created in the HPC Project Portal. Projects created before that continue to work except that all management must be done by support ticket (see Getting Started to get the right email address) until migrated to the HPC Project Portal. The pre-HPC-Project-Portal projects must migrate on their next renewal, or at an earlier data if the PI/s choose.

Info

Certain management operations such as adding new users to a project are not possible on non-migrated projects, which means that PI/s wanting to do them will need to trigger the migration process early.

Preparing for Migration

Migration is a multi-step process:

  1. The PI/s must create Academic Cloud accounts if they do not already have them. In many cases, one already has an Academic Cloud account as part of the federated institutional login. Otherwise, create an account.
  2. The PI/s must login to Academic Cloud at least once and get their usernames (go to the Account page) or provide the email address their Academic Cloud account is listed under.
  3. (Optional) Any number of non-PI project members do steps 1 and 2 as well and collect their usernames or email addresses their accounts are listed under.
  4. If migrating unprompted (before renewal), a member of the project (a PI or someone authorized by the PI/s) must start a support ticket requesing migration (see Getting Started to get the right email address). If the PI/s have been contacted about migrating, they must simply reply. In both cases, the usernames of the PI/s and any other members to migrate (or email addresses listed under their Academic Cloud) must be provided as well as to which user all existing files/directories should have their ownship changed to.
  5. We will get confirmation from every PI who did not send the migration request or do the migration response. This is done to ensure all PIs are on board.
  6. The PI/s (or who they designate) must make an appointment for the day the migration is to take place. This is important because the project must not be used during the migration process.
  7. The migration takes place on the agreed upon day. Note that all the project’s Slurm jobs that have not finished before the migration begins will be cancelled. The migration will take up to 1 day to complete.

Changes During Migration

Migrating a project to the HPC Project Portal brings with it many changes which are summarized below:

Changes for The Project

The project undergoes the following changes during migration:

  1. POSIX group changes from PROJECT to HPC_PROJECT. This is accompanied by a GID change.
  2. Slurm account is changed:
    1. Old Slurm account is deleted (all legacy users removed from it).
    2. New Slurm account with the same name is created in the appropriate location in the project tree.
    3. Remaining compute balance from the old Slurm account is set as the limit of the new account.
    4. The project-specific usernames for the migrated users are added to the new Slurm account.
  3. New data stores are created.
  4. The owner and group of the old data stores are changed to the new POSIX group and the project-specific username of one of the PI/s or some other member the PI/s choose/s. Note that this means the legacy users can no longer access the project data.
  5. Filesystem quotas on the old data stores are rebuilt.

Changes for The Project Members

The following changes happen to the members of the project during the migration:

  1. The legacy NHR/HLRN username of the member is removed from the Slurm account of the project (can no longer submit jobs on the account).
  2. The legacy NHR/HLRN username of the member loses access to the project data due to the change in project POSIX group.
  3. If the PI/s are migrating the member, the member gets a new project-specific username in the new project using their Academic Cloud account which:
    1. Gets a new HOME directory and other data stores.
    2. Made a member of the new POSIX group of the project, thereby giving access to the project data.
    3. Added to the project’s new Slurm account.

After the migration, the legacy NHR/HLRN username still works. Login will still possible and the data in the HOME directory and other data stores of the NHR/HLRN username will be preserved until 6 months after the last project the legacy NHR/HLRN username is in has ended or migrated. To migrate data from your legacy NHR/HLRN username to your new one, see the Data Migration Guide.