Accounts and access

In order to use the infrastructure of the VSC, you need a VSC user-ID, also called a VSC account. Check the VSC website for conditions.

All VSC-accounts start with the letters vsc followed by a five-digit number. The first digit gives information about your home institution. There is no relationship with your name, nor is the information about the link between VSC-accounts and your name publicly accessible.

Your VSC account gives you access to most of the VSC Tier-2 infrastructure, though for some more specialized hardware you may have to ask access separately. The rationale is that we want to ensure that that specialized (usually rather expensive) hardware is used efficiently for the type of applications it was purchased for. Contact your local VSC coordinator to arrange access when required.

For the main Tier-1 compute cluster you need to submit a project application (or you should be covered by a project application within your research group).

Before you apply for VSC account, it is useful to first check whether the infrastructure is suitable for your application. Windows or macOS programs for instance cannot run on our infrastructure as we use the Linux operating system on the clusters. The infrastructure also should not be used to run applications for which the compute power of a good laptop is sufficient. The pages on the Tier-1 Infrastructure and Tier-2 Infrastructure give a high-level description of our infrastructure. You can find more detailed information in the user documentation on the user portal. When in doubt, you can also contact your local support team. This does not require a VSC account.

VSC Accounts

New users of the VSC services should take the following steps to get their VSC account and access the VSC infrastructure:

• 1. New VSC Account
  • Applying for your VSC account
  • Next steps
  • Additional information
• 2. Authentication
  • Security Keys
  • Multi Factor Authentication (MFA)
• 3. Access VSC Infrastructure
  • Terminal interface
  • GUI applications on the clusters
  • VPN
• 4. Account management
  • Managing user credentials
  • Group management
  • Virtual Organization management
  • Managing disk space