Types of User Accounts

Do you already have an HPC-enabled account, but are unsure what kind of account you have and which login nodes and 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 is made up of several node groups and cluster islands, funded by different institutions (see Cluster Overview for details). As we transition to a new project management system, you may encounter a confusing mix of account types, especially if you have more than one. The most important distinction is between Project Portal accounts and older, so-called legacy accounts. In addition, depending on your institutional affiliation, you are allowed to use different parts of our system and there are according differences between 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. It is important to keep in mind that these are project-specific HPC accounts. They are only valid on the HPC cluster itself and are associated with / owned by an AcademicID. Within the HPC systems, each of your project-specific users (if you are a member of multiple projects) is a separate, full user account with its own HOME/WORK directories, its own quotas and allocation of resources it can use.

The AcademicID is your primary username, that you use for other services provided by GWDG or your university. It is used to login to the Project Portal, JupyterHPC, Chat AI or any other service that does not require SSH access. Your AcademicID can not be used to connect to the HPC cluster via SSH, unless it is a full employee account of the university of Göttingen, MPG or GWDG that has been 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:

On each project’s page, 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 your account type

“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 NHR/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 multiple user accounts, each of them is completely separate and by default unable see or access 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