New VSC Account#

VSC accounts are the user account system used across the VSC infrastructure. It is hence mandatory to create your own personal VSC account to access our services.

Using VSC accounts is transparent though. They are tied to your existing account in your home institute and therefore, it is not necessary to set up any additional passwords. Only a cryptographic key will be needed to access the terminal interface of the VSC clusters.

Applying for your VSC account#

UHasselt has an agreement with KU Leuven to run a shared infrastructure. Therefore the procedure is the same for both institutions.

Who?

Access is available for faculty students (under faculty supervision), and researchers of the KU Leuven, UHasselt and their associations.

How?

Researchers with a regular personnel account (u-number) can use the generic procedure.

  • If you are in one of the higher education institutions associated with KU Leuven, the generic procedure may not work. In that case, please e-mail hpcinfo@kuleuven.be to get an account. You will have to provide a public ssh key generated as described above.

  • Lecturers of KU Leuven and UHasselt that need HPC access for giving their courses should be aware that the procedure requires action both from the lecturers and from the students. Students can simply apply for the account through the generic procedure while lecturers should follow the specific procedure outlined herein:

    Lecturer’s procedure to request student accounts

    We support using HPC for educational purposes, and we fully assist the lecturers with all aspects of using HPC in the classroom, such as creating studing accounts, granting credits, resource reservation (if needed), and also live technical support during the trainings.

    In order to make this experience as convenient as possible for the students and the for the lecturer, it is requested that the lecturer (or any course responsible) would take the following actions:

    1. Submit a request to hpcinfo@.kuleuven.be 1-2 weeks before the beginning of the course. Please provide a short description of the course, and explain why the HPC facilities are necessary for teaching the course. It is mandatory to provide a list of students with their full names, KU Leuven/UHasselt email addresses, and their student number. For KU Leuven an export from the participants in Toledo is fine.

    2. For all students on the list a VSC-account will be created without any further action required by the student. The students will receive a mail when the account is created. This account wil have no associated ssh-key. If needed the students can create and upload one, but for most usage this will be no longer needed.

    3. We encourage to create a specific project for the course, with the project name starting with p_edu_. We will assign compute credits to this project, and add the students to the account. The course lecturer will be the moderator of the project. This gives the lecturer an opportunity to track the use of the Tier-2 clusters by individual users during the course. For more information about the procedure of requesting the project please refer to the page Slurm accounting.

    4. We advise to use Open OnDemand service for the student to get access to the login nodes, file browser and the job submission. The student will only need to use a browser and does not need to install any other software. Students will login through the KU Leuven Multi Factor Authentication (MFA), no additional ssh-agent is required.

    5. To ensure that students jobs do not wait in the queue during the hands-on sessions, we offer to reserve some limited resources during the session. In that case, please submit your exact resource requirements one week before the training, by latest. We will communicate the <reservation_name> with you for every exercise session. To submit the job during the class to the reserved resources, the --reservation argument needs to be used, e.g.:

      $ sbatch --account=<project_name> --reservation=<reservation_name> jobscript.slurm

      where project_name refers to the project created by the lecturer for the purpose of the course, and the <reservation_name> refers to an existing reservation on the system for the spcific course. The reservation name can also be passed as a parameter in the OpenOnDemand form.

    6. In case your workflow requires extra access to the cluster with other applications (such as NX, FileZilla, etc.) the students need to generate private-public key pair, and add the public key it to their VSC account via the VSC account page. Then, the students need to configure NoMachine client to use NX, and/or configure FileZilla for the file transfer

    7. If you are not using Open OnDemand, make sure that the software to connect to the cluster (Putty, MobaXterm, Xming, FileZilla, NX) is available in the PC-class that will be used during the course. For KU Leuven courses, please follow the procedure at https://icts.kuleuven.be/sc/pcklas/ictspcklassen (1 month before the beginning of the course).

Who?

Access is available for faculty students (master’s projects under faculty supervision), and researchers of the AUHA.

How?

Researchers can use the generic procedure.

  • Master students can also use the infrastructure for their master thesis work. The promoter of the thesis should first send a motivation to hpc@uantwerpen.be and then the generic procedure should be followed (using your student UAntwerpen id) to request the account.

All information about the access policy is available in English at the UGent HPC web pages.

Who?

Access is available for faculty students (master’s projects under faculty supervision), and researchers of UGent.

How?

Researchers and students can use the generic procedure.

All information about the access policy is available on the VUB-HPC documentation website.

Who?

Access is available for faculty students (under faculty supervision), and researchers of VUB and their associations.

How?

Researchers with a regular VUB account (@vub.be) can use the generic procedure. VUB and UZB staff, including PhD students, will get automatic approval of their VSC account.

  • Non-PhD students of VUB may get access subject to the specific conditions detailed below. Their VSC account must be requested by their Professor or Promoter by filling out VUB’s VSC account request form. Note that this form is not accessible to students.

    • Courses: All students can use the HPC cluster if required for practical courses.

    • Bachelor or Master Thesis: students working towards a Bachelor or Master thesis can use the HPC cluster for their research.

Who?

Check that you are eligible to use VSC infrastructure.

How?

Ask your VSC contact for help. If you don’t have a VSC contact yet, please get in touch with us.

Generic procedure for academic researchers#

For most researchers from the Flemish universities, the procedure has been fully automated and works by using your institute account to request a VSC account. Check below for exceptions or if the generic procedure does not work.

  1. Open the VSC account page

  2. Select your “home” institution from the drop-down menu and click the “confirm” button

  3. Log in using your institution login and password

  4. Optional You will be asked to upload your cryptographic public key. This key is need to access the terminal interface of VSC clusters. Do so if you created a SSH key pair already, otherwise it can be done at a later time.

  5. You will be asked for your scientific domain, please pick one from the NWO classification list

  6. Once your application is submitted, you will receive a confirmation e-mail. Click the included link to do so

  7. At this point your account application will be reviewed by the VSC staff. Once it is approved, you will be notified via e-mail

Warning

Allow for at least half an hour for your account to be properly created after receiving the notification email about your account approval!

Note

If you can’t connect to the VSC account page , some browser extensions have caused problems (and in particular some security-related extensions), so you might try with browser extensions disabled.

Next steps#

Register for an HPC Introduction course. These are organized at all universities on a regular basis.

Information on our training program and the schedule is available on the VSC Training website.

Note

KU Leuven If there is no course announced, users of KU Leuven can register to the training waiting list and we will organize a new session as soon as we get a few people interested in it.

Additional information#

Your account also includes two blocks of disk space: your home directory and data directory. Both are accessible from all VSC clusters. When you log in to a particular cluster, you will also be assigned one or more blocks of temporary disk space, called scratch directories. Which directory should be used for which type of data, is explained in the page Storage locations.

Your VSC account does not give you access to all available software. You can use all free software and a number of compilers and other development tools. For most commercial software, you must first prove that you have a valid license or the person who has paid the license on the cluster must allow you to use the license. For this you can contact your local support team.