A valid accreditation at EPFL is required to get an account on our facilities.
Accounts for researchers
Pay-per-use account for a lab/group or a project
Pay-per-use accounts are charged for their real usage of the system. The fees are eligible for FNS and ERC as service costs.
A Service Agreement shall be signed by the Head of the lab prior to creating an account. An invoice and a detailed usage report for compute and storage services will be sent monthly to the lab.
The invoices can be sent to FNS and ERC for reimbursement.
Please check our User Documentation to get more information.
Priority access for research emergencies
Access for emergencies can be given for special needs (end of thesis, conference, paper submission deadline, etc.).
Accounts for bachelor and master students
SCITAS provides high performance computational resources to support students in their academic activities.
Master account
The supervisors of EPFL bachelor and master students can ask SCITAS for a temporary account with limited access to HPC resources for their student’s semester project or master thesis.
Only students with a valid EPFL accreditation can have a master account.
Access to clusters Jed (CPUs) and Izar (GPUs) is granted for the duration of the semester. Accounts are automatically erased when the semester is finished (beginning of July for the spring semester / beginning of February for the autumn semester). Once the account is erased, all data on /scratch and /home will be erased as well.
The request must be submitted by the the supervisor of the project.
Courses
Access to the infrastructure for courses is handled by the Teachers/Teaching Assistants. For more details, please view this page.
External collaborators
External collaborators can connect to our clusters, provided they have an accreditation within the lab they collaborate with. They can be given a status of ‘Invited Guest‘ or ‘Outside EPFL’ depending on the type of collaboration:
‘Invited Guest’ status
The “Invited Guest” status is used for a person working at EPFL who participates in administrative, research and/or teaching activities within an EPFL unit, but without being a staff member. Its activities are governed by a contract where the identity of the person is explicitly mentioned. A person who has this status can benefit from certain services and/or benefits, except those reserved for staff members or the student body. It is a third party not under EPFL.
For example: guest professor, host professor, academic host, doctoral assistant or doctoral student without EPFL contract, intern, etc.
Status ‘Outside EPFL’
This status is used for a person who must have access to services and/or benefits in a restricted manner to carry out activities on our campus. It is a third party not under EPFL.
For example: consultant, representative, civilist, etc…
Procedure:
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Lab asks the external user to sign the document “Additional rules for the attention of external persons with access to EPFL’s IT system” => download the document
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Lab creates an accreditation as ‘Invited Guest’ or ‘Outside EPFL’ and fills in the private e-mail address or the professional outside EPFL e-mail address (at the very end of the page of accreditation). The EPFL username and password will be sent to this address.
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Lab adds the person as a member of their group hpc-xxx.
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Lab opens a ticket at SCITAS by sending an e-mail to [email protected] with “HPC external user” in the title and provides the following information:
a) e-mail address of the external person
b) status given in the accreditation (‘Invited Guest’ or ‘Outside EPFL’)
b) confirms that the person has been added to their group hpc-xxx
c) copy of the signed document “Additional rules for the attention of external persons with access to EPFL’s IT system” -
SCITAS sends to the external person all the information needed to connect to our VPN and our the clusters.
Rates
Our prices are available here (as of November 2024).
Rates may be adjusted yearly to reflect changes in the costs of building and operating the facility. Users are informed of price changes with a minimum of one month’s notice.
User documentation
Our user documentation is available here.
Technical support
If you need technical assistance, please contact our support by sending an e-mail to [email protected]. For a quicker processing, please put the word “HPC” in the email subject. This way, the ticket is directly assigned to us and doesn’t need to be sorted by the general Help Desk.
Administrative support
If you have questions concerning the accounts or any other administrative aspects, please contact our Administrative Assistants.