How Do I Register?

To access our HPC facilities you must be a member of an HPC Project. Read on to understand what an HPC Project is, and who is eligible to apply.

An HPC project is a record of your request, a grouping of users who you want to access resources on the HPC, as well as a place to view the reports, utilisation data and analysis of historic jobs. We also use your HPC project on the portal in a public directory of users of our facilities. The description of the tools and software used in your project, as well as the type of computation and workflow will be used to inform others about the impact of the HPC facilities on Newcastle University research output.

A HPC project should be for a single, well-defined project or activity. The creation of generic 'lab' or 'group' projects is not permitted, as per our Access, Accounts & Projects policies.

To apply for a new HPC project account, you must have an existing Newcastle University IT account - this implies that you must either be a member of staff, or a student enrolled on one or more academic modules or programmes.

For more details about restrictions on accounts, please view our Access, Accounts & Policies page.

Use of the HPC facilities for asynchronous teaching, i.e. self-study, project work and non-timetabled activity is generally considered to be within the scope of normal HPC projects and will be processed as per a normal request.

If you have a need to use the HPC facilities for synchronous practical sessions, on a regular, timetabled basis, or for substantial numbers of taught students, please contact the RSE team before making your request, as this may need special consideration by our academic leadership team.

Unlike Rocket, all requests for new HPC projects and accounts for Comet are handled through this website. You can apply to register new HPC projects using the My HPC Projects link, accessed from the menu under the 'My Account' button from the top of any page.

Registrations for new Comet projects are now open. All users may apply for access - if you have an existing Rocket project these will be automatically re-registered for Comet on your behalf.

The new request workflow for Comet HPC projects is handled entirely within this website - you do not need to raise an ITService ticket with NUIT.

Before you start the Comet HPC Project registration process, note the following:

• You must pass the HPC Driving Test before being able to request a new project, or log in to the facility.
• The full criteria for registering a new HPC Project can be found in our Policies - Access, Accounts & Projects section.
• An HPC Project should be for a discrete project, piece of work, research activity or academic module or programme

Once you have satisfied the above criteria you can follow the steps below to submit your registration request:

Log in to the main HPC Portal website (not this community wiki). You can do so using either the Login option in the top menu bar, or from the homepage using the My HPC Projects link - both options highlighted in the image below:

Once you have logged in you can access the My HPC Projects link, either from the homepage, or using the option which is available from the drop-down list from the My Account in the top menu bar:

Note that most non-RSE staff will only have a sub-set of the options shown in the above image; but all users should see:

• My HPC Profile - a summary of the information we hold on your account relating to your HPC projects and resource use
• My HPC Driving Tests - a link to the HPC Driving Test area and any certificates
• My HPC Projects - your personalised list of HPC projects and the global catalogue of all registered projects

The My HPC Projects page gives you the option of viewing any of your associated HPC projects, browsing the list of all registered projects and submitting a new request. Choose the Request New HPC Project option from the available tabs, as shown in the image below:

Provided you have passed the HPC Driving Test, you should see the start of the request form, this explains some of the restrictions on creating new projects. Ensure that you have read and understood these before proceeding.

Complete the request form, filling in all fields - every section is mandatory. You should supply sufficient information in all free-text boxes to give the Research Software Engineering team the details necessary to approve your request without further contact.

If the information you provide is not detailed enough, your request may be rejected.

Further details of these fields are shown below:

• Project Title - The title of your HPC project, your research project or area of activity. This title will be publicly listed, so this should not contain any sensitive information.
• Project Description - A longer description of the aims of your research project or activity. This should be detailed enough to be useful to give evidence in University reports on the impact of HPC resources on research outputs. This should not contain sensitive information.
• Software Description - A description of the applications, software languages, frameworks and libraries used in your HPC based workflows. A summary of the type of processing techniques and types of compute resources intended to be used is also useful here. This should not contain sensitive information.
• Supporting Information - A simple reason outlining why you are applying for the Comet HPC project (e.g. a new area of research not already covered by an existing project, no other appropriate resources available).
• Primary Owner - A permanent member of staff who will be the primary contact for any queries, billing or outputs generated by the use of HPC resources utilised by this project. If you allocate a student here the request will be rejected.
• Secondary Owner - A permanent member of staff who will be the secondary contact for this project; in the event the primary contact is unavailable. If you allocate a student here the request will be rejected.
• Funding Category - An indication if this project is unfunded or has funds in place for HPC resources or is funded externally. Only projects with funds available and allocated to HPC may access the paid compute resources of Comet.

Complete all fields and submit the form. It will then be sent to the Research Software Engineering team for approval.

If your project has been flagged as funded, then a member of the RSE team will contact you to confirm various details, including:

• What funds have already been allocated
• How much of the funds you want to credit to your HPC project as a starting balance (for cost management purposes)
• What cost centre or research account code should be used for invoicing

If the information you have provided is deemed accurate and sufficient then your project will be registered and added to the My HPC Projects section of the website. You and the nominated project owners will receive an email detailing the registration of the project, the assigned project name / Slurm account code and an invitation to log in to the website to further manage the newly registered project.

Project Owners will be automatically assigned to the project. If you are not the project owner, then you will now need to ask the owners to set up the initial members of the team, including the option of setting one or more Project Managers who can manage additional members on their behalf.

If the project owners/members of the project have already passed the HPC Driving Test then the next working day they will be able to:

• Connect to Comet via SSH
• Access the HPC Project directory (found under /nobackup/proj/project_account_code)
• Submit jobs to Slurm using the newly created project account code

If your project is funded, then we will also add a record of the cost centre you have supplied, as well as the negotiated initial funding balance credited to your project. Additional access to the Slurm paid partitions on Comet will automatically be added.

If the information you have provided is deemed not accurate, insufficient or in some other manner the request is not approved you will receive an email informing you of the rejection. This email will include the reason that it has not been accepted.

Additional information about how you now manage your registered HPC Project is available in the How Do I Manage My HPC Projects? page. This includes the following:

• Adding or removing HPC Project members
• Assigning Project Owner or Project Manager roles
• Viewing project balances
• Viewing project compute resource utilisation

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