Types of User Accounts

Do you already have an HPC-enabled account, but are unsure what login nodes / partitions you should use? Have you heard terms like “legacy SCC/HLRN account” and are unsure of what that means or if it applies to you? 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. Within the HPC systems, each of your project-specific users (if you are a member of mutliple projects) is a separate, full user account with it’s own HOME/WORK directories, it’s own quotas and allocation of resources it can use.

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 can 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:

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.

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.
  • Your regular GWDG-, Uni Göttingen employee-, UMG- or MPG-account, if it was ever activated for HPC usage, is considered a legacy SCC user account.
  • Examples: If your name is John Doe, possible usernames are john.doe2, jdoe, doe15, …

File/Directory Access from multiple User Accounts

When you have mutliple user accounts, each of them is completely separate and by default can’t see or access the files and directories belonging to the others. To see what storage locations are assigned to your current user, run show-quota. Environment variables like $HOME, $WORK and the hidden directory/symlink .project in your home directory (which contains more symlinks) also point to directories you can use. See the Data Migration Guide to learn how to copy/move files between your different users or configure directories to be accessible from all of them.

Overview

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