Administrative Information

How to get an account

User accounts overview

HPCC supports 5 types of accounts: a) CUNY full time faculty and research staff b) CUNY adjunct faculty and master students c) doctoral graduate students d) undergraduate students e) collaborators from other universities working with CUNY faculty, and f) public and private sector partners directly collaborating with CUNY faculty/department/school/center. Users from all a) to f) groups may receive authorization to use the CUNY HPC Center systems. Applications for accounts are accepted at any time. The accounts in groups a) and c) are valid for one year and must be renewed on or before Sept 30th each year. Accounts from b) and d) are valid for one semester and must be renewed at the beginning of fall and spring semester. The accounts in groups e) and f) are good for the duration of collaborative project. In addition non-CUNY researchers can obtain a research account at CUNY-HPCC and use the resources by paying cost recovery fee (proportional to use). Please contact the director of HPCC for details.

A user account is issued to an individual user. Accounts are not to be shared. Users are responsible for choose secure passwords and to protect their passwords. Passwords are not to be shared. Users from a), b), c) and d) groups must have and use a valid CUNY e-mail address when register to HPC. Public mail accounts such as gmail, hotmail, yahoo ,outlook etc. can be used only as a second (backup) e-mail. Users in group e) must provide an e-mail which can be verified and state the CUNY collaborator e-mail as second mailbox. The users from group f) and outside users doing research on CUNY HPCC must provide valid professional e-mail address of their CUNY counterpart(s) including valid CUNY e-mail(s). Note that HPCC will not send warning and any messages to non CUNY e-mails unless is needed for emergency and registered users from groups e) and f).

Please submit request for new account directly to HPC via hpchelp@csi.cuny.edu e-mail. It is mandatory to provide information on all points of below list before submit back to hpchelp@csi.cuny.edu. Please do not forget to provide information about past and pending publications and funded projects and information about your local available resources. Think carefully about the resources needed and try to estimate as accurate as possible. Note that by applying for and obtaining an account, the user agrees to the Center’s Acceptable Use Policy and the User Account and Password Policy.

In a case the above mentioned link to hpcreg1 is down the users may send an e-mail to hpchelp@csi.cuny.edu with the following information:

1. Full name as stated at the CUNY ID card:

2. For group e) only - Full name as stated at the University ID card (Jeanette Smith):

3. For group f) only- Full name as stated on State ID or Federal ID (e.g. Smith John Peter):

4. CUNY EID and valid CUNY e-mail (e.g. John A. Smith 22341356 jsmith@csi.cuny.edu):

5. Affiliation within CUNY - campus name and Department ( e.g Hunter College, Biology):

6. Affiliation outside CUNY if any(e.g. Rutgers University) and valid professional e-mail: ( e.g. John Doe, Rutgers University, jd@rutgers.edu)

7. Department at above (6) institution:

8. Second CUNY affiliation - campus name and Department (e.g. Graduate Center, Biology):

9. E-mail at (6):

10. Academic status ( faculty, adjunct faculty, graduate student, undergraduate student, research staff, collaborator to CUNY researcher, partners , external researcher):

11. Who will be is responsible for cost recovery charges, if any? Name and e-mail:

12. Brief project description and project duration. In case of teaching/participating in class please state class number and semester (e.g. CS 456, fall 2023):

13. Comma separated list of Principal investigator(s) or research advisor(s) name, status, campus and department:

14. Resources needed:

- cpu cores

- GPU cores

- cpu hours

- GPU hours

- storage GB

15. If out of College of Staten Island: description of available local resources. Please state NONE if you do not have access to local computational resources. Otherwise provide:

- type of computational (cluster, advanced workstation):

- number of nodes:

- number of cores per node:

-- memory per node:

- total number of GPU for server:

- number of GPU per node:

- type of GPU (list of all types e.e. 2 x K20m, 4 x K80):

16. Consent that if CUNY-HPCC moves to fee-for-service model you or your PI/advisor(s) will ensure funds to support your project(s) ( fees for cpu time, storage and backup of data).

17. Consent that financial support for computational resources will be included in all future proposals to funding agencies.

18. Consent that HPCC will be cited properly (see our wiki for details) in all your published work including conferences and talks.

Upon creation every research user account is provided with 50 GB (and max of 10000 files on /global/u) home directory mounted as /global/u/<userid>. If required, a user may request an increase in the size of their home directory. The HPC Center will endeavor to satisfy reasonable requests. If you expect to have more than 10 000 files please zip several small files into larger single zip file. Please keep only wrangled information in your space in order to optimize use of the existing storage.

Student class accounts ( group d)) are provided with 10 GB home directory. Please note that class accounts and data will be deleted 30 days after the semester ends (unless otherwise agreed upon). Students are responsible for backing up their own data prior to the end of the semester.

When a user account is established, only the user has read/write to his files. The user can change his UNIX permissions to allow others in his group to read/write to his file.

Please be sure to notify the HPC Center if user accounts need to be removed or added to a specific group.

Reset Password

Users must use automatic password reset system. Click on Reset Password. Upon resetting the users will get their individual security token on the e-mail address registered with HPCC.

Close of account

If a user would like to close their account, please contact the CUNY at HPCHelp@csi.cuny.edu. Supervisors that would like to modify the access of their researchers and/or students working for them should contact the HPC to remove, add or modify access. User accounts that are not accessed or renewed for 2+ years will be purged along with any data associated with the account.

Project accounts

Users and/or groups requiring additional disk storage and/or iRods accounts are required to fill out a Project Application Form (PAF). This form is to be filled out by the principal investigator (PI) of the project, and will provide project details including but not limited to: project and grant information, group members required access shared project files, and project needs (disk space, software, etc.).

All members of the group will need to fill out a User Account Form (UAF) before accounts and access can be granted to them. Supervisors and/or their designated project managers will be responsible for providing access and/or limitations to their assigned group members. [Details on this process are described in the Projects section.]

IN DEVELOPMENT:

The Project Application Form can be found at the following link Project Application form.

Message of the day (MOTD)

Users are encouraged to read the "Message of the day” (MOTD), which is displayed to the user upon logging onto a system. The MOTD provides information on scheduled maintenance time when systems will be unavailable and/or important changes in the environment that are of import to the user community. The MOTD is the HPC Center’s only efficient mechanism for communicating to the broader user community as bulk email messages are often blocked by CUNY SPAM filters.

Required citations

The CUNY HPC Center appreciates the support it has received from the National Science Foundation (NSF). It is the policy of NSF that researchers who are funded by NSF or who make use of facilities funded by NSF acknowledge the contribution of NSF by including the following citation in their papers and presentations:

This research was supported, in part, under National Science Foundation Grants: CNS-0958379, CNS-0855217, ACI-1126113 and OEC-2215760 (2022) and the City University of New York High Performance Computing Center at the College of Staten Island.

The HPC Center, therefore, requests its users to follow this procedure as it helps the Center demonstrate that NSF’s investments aided the research and educational missions of the University.

Reporting requirements

The Center reports on its support of the research and educational community to both NSF and CUNY on an annual basis. Citations are an important factor that is included in these reports. Therefore, the Center requests all users to send copies of research papers developed, in part, using the HPC Center resources to hpchelp@csi.cuny.edu. This also helps the Center to keep abreast of user research requirement directions and needs.

CUNY HPC systems’ naming conventions

The Center names its systems after noteworthy CUNY alumni. There are many good reasons for this:

• It honors the accomplishments of these alumni.

• It informs or reminds students of the accomplishments of former CUNY students and, hopefully, inspires them.

• It heightens public awareness of the contributions of these alumni and of the role played by CUNY.

The current systems at the HPC Center are named after Kenneth Appel, Bruce Chizen, Andy Grove, Jonas Salk, Robert Kahn, and Arno Penzias. More information on each of these persons and systems follows:

ANDY is named in honor of Dr. Andrew S. Grove, a City College alumnus and one of the founders of the Intel Corporation. It is an SGI cluster with 744 processor cores. ANDY is for jobs using 64 cores or fewer and for Gaussian jobs.

APPEL is named in honor of Dr. Kenneth Appel (pronounced ah-PEL), an alumnus of Queens College. Appel, along with Wolfgang Haken, used computers to assist in proving the 4-color theorem. Appel said, “Most mathematicians, even as late as the 1970s, had no real interest in learning about computers. It was almost as if those of us who enjoyed playing with computers were doing something nonmathematical or suspect.” APPEL is a SGI UV300 with 384 cores and 12 terabytes of shared memory—a system nicely configured to solve problems in computational group theory—and group theory was Appel’s area of research.

CHIZEN is named in honor of Bruce Chizen, former CEO of Adobe, and a Brooklyn College alumnus. CHIZEN is the system that is used as a gateway to the above HPC systems. It is not used for computations.

KARLE is named in honor of Dr. Jerome Karle, an alumnus of the City College of New York who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1985. KARLE is a Dell shared memory system with 24 processor cores. KARLE is used for serial jobs, Matlab, SAS, parallel Mathematica, and certain ARCview jobs. It is the only system that supports running interactive jobs relying on graphical user interface.

PENZIAS is named in honor of Dr. Arno Penzias, a Nobel Laureate in Physics, and a City College alumnus. PENZIAS is a cluster with 1,152 Intel Sandy Bridge cores each with 4 Gbytes of memory. It is divided into 2 virtual nodes, one with 12 cores and no GPUs and one with 4 cores and 2 GPUs. It is used for applications requiring up to 128 cores. It also supports 136 NVIDIA Kepler K20 accelerators.

Funding

The systems at Center were funded as follows:

DSMS, NSF Grant ACI-1126113

ANDY, NSF Grant CNS-0855217 and the New York City Council through the efforts of Borough President James Oddo

APPEL, New York State Regional Economic Development Grant through the efforts of State Senator Diane Savino

PENZIAS, The Office of the CUNY Chief Information Officer

SALK, NSF Grant CNS-0958379 and a New York State Regional Economic Development Grant