Accounts

Getting an account

To create a CHPC account, ensure you have an active University of Utah account (uNID) and fill in the application form.

Make sure you have an active University of Utah account (uNID)

You must be provisioned at the University of Utah campus level with a valid, active uNID (University of Utah ID number) in order to be provisioned at CHPC.If you do not have an active uNID, please follow the instructions in the section on acquiring an active uNID.

Complete the CHPC account application

You will be asked to sign in at the campus level; you must have a valid, active uNID to proceed.

Class accounts must be completed with a separate student account application form. This form uses an account authentication token which the instructor can see at the Classes List page.

If you are faculty and wish to become a CHPC PI, you will need to select "I am a New PI (Faculty Only)" on the faculty advisor drop down. If you are a student, staff, post-doc, or an affiliate of the university, and your sponsor is listed in the drop down, you can proceed by selecting that PI. If your PI is not listed, you will need to request that he/she be set up as a CHPC PI by selecting "Not Listed (Invite PI to set up account)"; this will send the PI a message requesting that he/she complete the CHPC account creation process. If you are a PI requesting an account for a user, the user will receive an email asking for validation of his/her email address.

CHPC Account application

Account approval

If you are a new PI, a senior staff member at the CHPC will review and approve your account. We like to sit down and discuss your particular research use case to make sure you can get the most out of your experience at the CHPC.

If your account is to be sponsored by a PI, an email will be sent to the PI asking for approval. After the PI approves, the CHPC will provision your account. An email will be sent to you with details.

Getting an active University of Utah account (uNID)

If you do not have a University of Utah account (uNID), you will need to acquire one prior to applying for a CHPC account.

If you are faculty from another Utah institution of higher education (e.g., USU, UVU, SUU, UTU, Snow College, Weber State University)

If you are a member of the faculty of a Utah institution of higher education and do not have a University of Utah account (uNID), you will need to send a request to helpdesk@chpc.utah.edu asking CHPC to request a uNID for you. Please include your full name, email address, and date of birth.

For faculty members, as part of the process CHPC staff will also request that you, as the head of your research group, be given access to request uNIDs for members of your group.

This request must be completed by CHPC staff.

You must use the correct date of birth, as this information is used to verify the identity of the affiliates (as the Social Security Number is not required). If false birthdates are used, the application will be rejected.

If you are requesting University of Utah accounts (uNIDs) for members of your research group

If you have already been set up as a CHPC PI, you may request uNIDs for your group by filling out an affiliate form. Make sure to select 10020 - CHPC  for the affiliate type and 00640 - CHPC. Ctr High Perf Computing for the Authorizing Deparmtent in order to be correctly provisioned to access CHPC systems. See the mockup of the affiliate request form for more information.

The affiliate form has several options: Request Affiliate, Deactivate Affiliate, Extend Affiliate Access, and View Request Status.

• For new affiliate IDs or to renew expired affiliate uNIDs, use the "Request Affiliate" option. Please note that if you include the existing uNID on the form, the process is usually quicker.
• On the form, there is a start date and an end date. By default, the start date is the date the form is completed and the end date is six months from that date; however, you can update this to be up to one year. Currently, one year is the maximum duration allowed for an affiliate uNID before needing to be renewed.

If you are collaborating with researchers at the University of Utah

If you are not a researcher affiliated with a Utah institution of higher education but are collaborating with others who are, you will need to request that the faculty member sponsoring your account fill out an affiliate form. Make sure to have them select 10020 - CHPC in order to be correctly provisioned to access CHPC systems. Affiliate IDs can be requested for up to one year (this will require manually modifying the end date to be one year from the start date); if affiliate accounts are needed for a longer period of time, they will need to be renewed, as discussed above. Here is a mockup of the form with some comments.

Notes on obtaining University of Utah accounts (uNIDs)

• When the uNID is created, the person making the request will receive an email. This email should be sent to the affiliate so that they can change the uNID password as instructed in the email.
• Please allow one business day after the start date of listed on the affiliate form, or overnight if the start date has already passed, for the uNID to become active.
• Passwords are created through Campus Information Services (CIS). Please go to CIS and use the uNID as the username with a lowercase u replacing the first zero. The initial password will be the birth date in the format MMDDYY with no dashes, slashes, or spaces. If successful, a notice about an expired password will appear. Click the link and create a permanent password. The username will not change.
•  Affiliate uNIDs expire and expired uNIDs can be reactivated. The authorizing department gets a list of upcoming expiring affiliates weekly. Therefore, by specifying the CHPC as the authorizing deparment as mentioned above, the uNID requested will show up on our list. We check for recent account activity, and if the account is actively being used, we renew. Otherwise, we let the uNID expire.
• If you have any issues logging in to your University of Utah account on CIS, please contact the Campus Help Desk, which can help you reset your password.
  
  • The CHPC cannot reset the password of your University of Utah account (uNID).

Getting accounts for a class that needs access to CHPC resources

To set up accounts for class use of CHPC, please make a request via helpdesk@chpc.utah.edu. Include the class name (i.e., CHEM 4500), the instructor's name, approximate number of students, and date by which accounts are needed. CHPC will then set up a class account with the instructor as the CHPC PI, and provide the instructor with a token to provide to members of the class. The students will use the token to request a CHPC account as part of the class at the a special account application web link that is sent along with the token to the class instructor. The token will work for students new to CHPC as well as students who have an existing CHPC account. See the article on "New CHPC Class Account Provisioning" in the Summer 2020 CHPC Newsletter for additional details.

What getting an account means

Every account provisioned at CHPC will get the following:

• Login (command line) access to all currently supported clusters. 
• Access to the cognizant PI's allocation (to run jobs at priority).
• A home directory with a default quota of 50 GB, which is not backed up unless your PI has purchased home directory space. If that is the case, then the space is backed up and the quota policies are set by the PI working with the CHPC.
• Access to scratch directory space provided for users to store intermediate files required during the duration of a job on one of the HPC clusters. Additional file storage can be obtained in the form of group space, purchased by the PI on a per-TB basis. 
• Subscription to CHPC-managed email lists. All accounts will be subscribed to the chpc-hpc-users@lists.utah.edu list, where we post outages, news, and other information pertinent to the research computing community on campus.
• Access to the CHPC issue tracking system (ServiceNow).

Deprovisioning of accounts

The deprovisioning of CHPC user accounts can be requested by the PI or the PI delegate via our ticketing system, helpdesk@chpc.utah.edu.

More information

Please see the Account Policies for more information.