- How to request access
- What we need to know
- What we do
- What to tell the participants
- Participants who undertake a project
If you wish to use the SCITAS clusters for an undergraduate or masters course, please read the following guide.
How to request access
All requests should be submitted via this form and a member of the SCITAS team will contact you.
What we need to know
Please specify in the form the following information:
- title of the course
- names of teachers/teaching assistants who should be administrators of the group (they will be able to add/remove the students from the group)
SCITAS will create a group for the course which will be managed by the group administrators.
Kindly note that members of course groups will be automatically erased on February 28th and July 31st. - type of resources needed
Please let us know if you need a specific architecture or accelerators such as GPUs and if you will be running multi-node jobs using MPI.
If you have a preference for a particular cluster, let us know (kindly note that we may not always be able to respect this choice). - dates of the course (when you need the resources)
Please specify in your request the dates of the course. Kindly mention if students need access to the resources outside of this period.
What we do
We will create an LDAP group with the asked administrator(s). Those administrators will be able to add members to this LDAP group.
We will give all members of the LDAP group access to the clusters and they will be able to use the batch system to submit jobs.
If the course has practical sessions, we will create a reservation for these periods to ensure that you have access to sufficient resources.
If access is required for a longer period, the group will be given an allocation on the clusters and this will be dimensioned in order to give the participants access to sufficient resources.
We will provide you with the name of the course account for the batch system along with the reservation name if appropriate.
If you have a reservation, it will normally begin one hour before the requested time slot. Please use this period to test that everything works as expected.
What to tell the participants
Depending on which cluster shall be used, the participants will need to connect to one of the login nodes as explained in our guide:
https://scitas-doc.epfl.ch/user-guide/using-clusters/connecting-to-the-clusters/
Every participant has scratch space at /scratch/<username> and this should be used for storing temporary files and writing output.
In addition to the standard options described in our guide, the participants should add the following directives to their job scripts:
#SBATCH --account=<course account name> #SBATCH --reservation=<reservation name>
Please remind the students that after the course finishes, their access will be revoked. They should copy elsewhere any files that they wish to keep.
Participants who undertake a project
If there are participants who carry out a bachelor/master project using the clusters after the end of the course, they should apply for an individual student account via this form https://support.epfl.ch/epfl?id=epfl_sc_cat_item&sys_id=c2e7380c4f0a5f00fe35adee0310c7dd . The project supervisor will need to validate their request.