UKy HPC - Account Information

Eligibility

Any regular faculty member or postdoc at the University of Kentucky, or at any research institution in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, may apply for an account to use the UK Supercomputer. Designated partners of the Supercomputer Center from outside of the Commonwealth may also submit proposals, although currently there are no such partners. Others may qualify when collaborating with a Principal Investigator who is qualified as described above.

Please contact the IT Customer Service Center with any questions about qualifying for a Supercomputer account. See the contact information on the right.

Application

Accounts on the Supercomputing cluster are Link Blue accounts, the same accounts used for Exchange email and a wide variety of other services on campus. Do one of the following to apply for Supercomputer access:

1. Print the Computing Accounts Request Form and fill it out. Under the heading Other accounts / services write HPC. Your dean, director, or the Security Liaison for your college or department must sign the form. Deliver, fax, or email it to User Account Services.
2. Have your dean, director, or the Security Liaison for your college or department email all of the necessary information to User Account Services.
3. If you are an eligible external researcher, then contact User Account Services for more information.

The right hand column has contact information for User Account Services in the IT Customer Service Center.

Allocations

Currently there are no hard limits on CPU or disk usage. Researchers must share the facility, and jobs may be limited to ensure that each one gets a fair share of the resources. Allocations may be instituted at some future time.

Policies

All users of any University of Kentucky Computing or Communications facility are expected to abide by all of the relevant policies and procedures. For more information, please see the UK Information Systems Policies document. In particular, note that accounts are granted to one person only and no other person may use the account. No exceptions will be made. Failure to abide by these policies may result in the suspension of computing privileges.

If your account becomes inaccessible, please contact User Account Services, using the contact information on the right. Ask specifically if the account has been suspended or disabled for some reason. If it has been suspended, then send email to the HPC support team (help-hpc@uky.edu) for more information.

Logging in

Once your HPC account has been set up, you may login by using ssh to connect to bcx.uky.edu. Use your Link-Blue userid and password as usual to authenticate.

See the Security page for more information on ssh.

After logging in for the first time, you may set up an ssh key-pair to authenticate in the future (or you may simply continue to use your Link-Blue password).

You must create a ".forward" file in your account with your current email address, so the HPC support team can contact you in the event of any problems or issues with your account.