What type of user account do I have?

Already have an HPC-enabled account, but are unsure what login nodes / partitions you should use? Then this page is for you.

User account types

Our HPC cluster constists of separate islands, funded by different institutions and as we are in the process of restructuring our project management, there is a potentially confusing variety of different types of user accounts that can be hard to keep apart, especially if you have multiple ones. The main difference is between Project Portal accounts and so-called “legacy” accounts. Then, depending on your affiliation with the different institutions eligible to use parts of our systems, there are other different account types:

Project Portal accounts

If your username looks like u12345 (u and a five-digit number), your user account is a Project Portal account. You should have received an email from “GWDG HPC Project Portal (hpc-project-service@gwdg.de)” when you were added to the respective project. Important things to keep in mind are that these are all project-specific HPC accounts, they are only valid on the actual HPC cluster and are associated with / owned by an AcademicID. The AcademicID is your actual username, that you use for other services either of GWDG or your university and is used to login to the Project Portal, JupyterHPC, Chat AI or any other service you connect to without using SSH. The AcademicID can not be used to connect to the HPC cluster via SSH directly (unless it is a full employee account of Uni Göttingen, MPG or GWDG and was separately activated as a legacy SCC account, see below).

When you log into the project portal, you will see an overview of projects you are a member of:

Example screenshot of the HPC Project Portal showing a list of a users' projects.

Project overview

To know which cluster island the project (and your associated user) belongs to, click View. You will then see a number of links at the top, detailing the tree structure your project is sorted under, starting with Projects.

Example screenshot of a portal projects' list of links detailing it's path in the project tree.

Project details hierarchy

This will tell you the cluster island:

  • Projects / Extern / NHR-NORD@Göttingen -> NHR
  • Projects / Extern / KISSKI -> KISSKI
  • Projects / Extern / EFRE-REACT GPU-Cluster für Maschinelles Lernen -> REACT
  • Projects / Extern / CIDAS -> treated like NHR
  • Projects / Extern / Research Units -> treated like NHR
  • Projects / Scientific Compute Cluster (SCC) -> SCC

“Legacy” accounts

  • If your username starts with 3 letters that you could not choose, two of which are short for the German federal state of your university (followed by 5 letters/digits that you chose), you are a legacy HLRN user.
    • Examples: nimjdoe, hbbmustr, bemhans1, mvilotte, …
  • If your user name is just your name, either in the form “first letter of first name, followed by your last name”, firstname.lastname or just your lastname, possibly followed by a number, you are most likely a legacy SCC user.
    • Examples: If your name is John Doe, possible usernames are john.doe2, jdoe, doe15, …

Overview

Type of userlogin nodes¹home filesystemscratch²partitions you can use³
Portal NHRglogin, glogin-gpuvast-nhrlustre-emmy-hdd/ssd, lustre-gretemedium96s, standard96(s), large96(s), huge96(s), grete
Portal SCClogin-mdc, transfer-sccvast-standardscratch1 (BeeGFS)medium, fat, fat+, gpu, int, gpu-int, vis, sgiz, scc96s, scc-a100
KISSKIglogin-gpuvast-kisskivast-kisskikisski, kisski-h100
REACTglogin-gpuvast-reactvast-reactreact, grete:interactive
Legacy HLRNglogin, glogin-gpuvast-nhrscratch-emmy, scratch-grete (Lustre)medium96s, standard96(s), large96(s), huge96(s), grete
Legacy SCClogin-mdc, transfer-sccStornextscratch1 (BeeGFS)medium, fat, fat+, gpu, int, gpu-int, vis, sgiz

[1]: See Logging In for more details
[2]: See Storage Systems for more details
[3]: See Compute Partititons for more details