User Accounts and Projects

User Accounts

Any faculty, staff, or student may request a User Account. A PI can assign Users and Resources to Projects.

PI accounts are able to request Resource Allocations. The process for requesting and obtaining Resource Allocations can be relatively simple, or may require a small proposal depending on the number of resources requested (see Requesting Allocations). If a Resource Allocation request is granted, the PI effectively becomes the "owner" of the resource allocation, and is free to assign the Resource Allocation(s) to any Projects for which they are the PI. (Note, some allocations are automatically pre-assigned to Projects).

Non-PI User Accounts are not able to request Resource Allocations. Instead, these accounts must be associated with a Project that has Resources. User accounts that are associated with a Project have access to all the resources
associated with the Project.

Users will typically be given resource-specific login IDs/passwords or access keys to each of the resources they are allowed to access. For example, when accessing a Unix-based system Users will be given an account where the login ID is their LinkBlue ID and the password is their Linkblue password. On Object Storage systems the ID will be an access key to be used in REST-based API calls (usually via an S3-compatible client program).

Projects

PIs are allowed to request the creation of a Project to support their research work or educational classes. It should be noted that all Project requests are reviewed and expected to be of the level/quality similar to that of a project
that the Office of Sponsored Projects (OSPA) would manage. Indeed, Project creation requests ideally include an OSPA account number to associate with the new Project. Project requests that are associated with an OSPA-managed research project will generally be created without the need for any additional justification. Projects may also be created in cases where there is no associated OSPA account, but they will be reviewed to be of the level/quality of
an OSPA-like projects and will be marked as a "UK Supported Research" research effort. Similarly, Projects can be requested for educational classes and will be reviewed to ensure the class requires the advanced computational resources available in CCS/ITS-RC.

Each Project is associated with the PI who requested the Project. Additional Users can also be associated with a Project. Note that is it possible to mark some Users as Co-PIs to denote their role on the Project. However, Co-PIs have
no special privileges over normal Users. The list of associated Users can be modified at any time, with the exception of the PI who created the Project. [PI changes require approval. Please contact CCS for any PI change requests.]

Every Project has a Project name structured as follows:
PIsLinkBlueID_ResearchProject
where

• PIsLinkblueID is the PI's LinkBlue ID, and

• ResearchProject is a name selected by the PI (e.g., a name for the research activity or a university course number).
  The ResearchProject name consists of lower case letters, numbers, and underbar symbols -- spaces and other punctuation symbols are not allowed. Although the ResearchProject name can be up to 20 characters long, we recommend selecting names where the first 6 characters are unique among the PI's projects, because some software may ignore characters after the 6th character.

For example, a faculty member with the Linkblue ID clp251 may request a Project with the ResearchProject name next_gen_solar resulting in the Project Name