How to get an account

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General

Only University of Calgary researchers are eligible for an account on our HPC systems. This means that any account applicant has to have an active UCalgary IT and Email account to be able to get access to ARC. If you are not University of Calgary researcher and have collaboration work that required access to the ARC cluster, you will have to obtain the status of the General Associate with UofC to get an IT account and a UofC email address first.


Any UofC researcher can request an account on the ARC cluster on their own, for this purpose graduate students and "up" are considered as researchers.

Undergraduate students are not researchers in this sense. If an undergraduate student is working for a research group and needs access to ARC, then their account has to be requested by their scientific supervisors. The supervisor will also have to confirm that the research work that the student is going to perform is related to the supervisor's area of research and that the student needs access to the ARC cluster.


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

Application form

About myself:

  • What is your status with UofC?
  • 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?


By applying for an ARC account I certify that 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 UofC Information Security Classification Standard.
https://www.ucalgary.ca/legal-services/sites/default/files/teams/1/Standards-Legal-Information-Security-Classification-Standard.pdf


ARC is a research cluster, which means it has high performance but can be stopped for required maintenance when needed. ARC's storage cannot and should not be used as a main storage facility for research data, as the data will not be available, if the cluster is under maintenance. The master copy of research data should be stored elsewhere and only part of that data are expected to be copied to ARC for computational analysis. Data on ARC's storage are not backed up.


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 your online training sessions

We offer introductory training sessions to the UCalgary researchers to familiarize them with the ARC High Performance Computing cluster. The online sessions (via zoom) are available every week, choose a date that suits you.

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Training Session 1: Introduction to cluster access

Tuesday 11am -12 noon

Course Level: Basic

Prerequisites: Familiarity with Linux Command line is essential for this training session.

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This session will provide an overview of the ARC cluster including the following topic:

  • How to access ARC?
  • When to move your research workflows to ARC
  • An overview of the cluster architecture
  • Basic Cluster Policy
  • How to organize your data on ARC?
  • How to send files back and forth from ARC?
  • Access the state of the cluster
  • Basic introduction to the idea of job schedulers

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Training Session 2: Introduction to Job Scheduling on HPC

Thursday 11am -12 noon

Course Level: Intermediate

Prerequisites: Prior understanding of an HPC environment is mandatory for this session. This can be achieved by attending the training session 1.

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This session will provide an overview of type of jobs, job scheduling, job monitoring.

  • How to find a pre-installed software on ARC?
  • How to access software in modules?
  • How to request an interactive job?
  • How to write Slurm scripts to submit a batch job?
  • How to request compute resources for a given job?
  • Job monitoring

Complete the online booking process here.

Book as many sessions as you need.

Please reach out to us at support@hpc.ucalgary.ca for more help.

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