How to get an account

Only University of Calgary researchers are eligible for an account on our HPC systems. The account applicant must have an active UCalgary IT and Email account to be able to get access to ARC.

Depending on your relationship with the University, your process of getting an ARC account will differ:

I am not a University of Calgary researcher	If you are not University of Calgary researcher and have collaboration work that required access to the ARC cluster, you must first obtain the status of the General Associate with the University in order to obtain a UCalgary email account. You may apply for an ARC account only after obtaining your University of Calgary IT and Email account.
I am a University of Calgary researcher or graduate student	All University of Calgary researchers, including graduate students, can directly request an account on the ARC cluster. There are no additional steps required.
I am an undergraduate student	If an undergraduate student is working for a research group and needs access to ARC, then their account has to be confirmed by their research supervisor. The supervisor will have to confirm that the research work the student is conducting is related to the supervisor's area of research and that the student needs access to the ARC cluster to facilitate this research. Every undergraduate student who needs an account on ARC is still expected to submit their own application, and answer all the questions on their own. If the student has difficulties with answering the application questions, it may be too early to create and account or the ARC environment is not appropriate for their research. ARC is a production research system and untrained users can potentially disrupt other researchers work.

To apply, please copy and paste the Application form below into an email message to support@hpc.ucalgary.ca and then respond to the questions in the text.

Please also include the subsequent clauses of understanding into your application as your agreement to these terms are mandatory.

Application form

About myself:

• What is your status with UofC (undergraduate student, PhD student, MS student, postdoc, visiting researcher, etc.)?

• What research group do you work for? Who is your supervisor?

(If you are a Principal Investigator yourself, please respond accordingly).

• How did you learn about the ARC cluster?

• Do you have any experience with Linux?

• Have you used compute clusters before?

• Does anybody else in your group use ARC for their work?

• What shortcoming of your work computer are you trying to address by using a compute cluster? What is lacking on your computer that is required for you work?

About the project(s) I am going to work on:

• Please tell us a briefly about the research topic you are going to be working on on ARC.

• What are the data you are planning to work on? What form is it in?

• What kind of analysis is it?

• What software are you going to be using?

• Do you have an estimate for the amount of work (please provide it, if known)?

Clauses of understanding

By applying for an ARC account I certify I understand that:

• The storage provided by the ARC cluster is only suitable for Level 1 and Level 2 data, as classified according to the University of Calgary Information Security Classification Standard (https://www.ucalgary.ca/legal-services/sites/default/files/teams/1/Standards-Legal-Information-Security-Classification-Standard.pdf)
• ARC's availability may be changed with little to no warning. While RCS take precautions to avoid interrupting running jobs, there may be instances where interruptions are occur including power or network interruptions. RCS may also take nodes offline for regular maintenance and node availability is subject to change.
• ARC's storage should not be used as your main storage facility for research data. Access to your data may be interrupted or temporarily unavailable when ARC is under maintenance. Data on ARC is not backed up. Your research group should ensure that the master copy of research data should be stored elsewhere. We highly recommend that only data used for computational analysis on ARC should reside on ARC.
• User's accounts on ARC are subject to automatic deletion after 12 months of inactivity. Please log in periodically to prevent your account from being deleted. You will be notified before the account is deleted. Please note that when an account is delete all the data stored in the home directory of the account are deleted as well.

Book online training sessions

After obtaining your ARC account, you may book online training sessions with one of our analysts to get started with ARC.