Compact guide to Initial Project Letters (PRACE)

Scope

The content of this page is of interest for any principal investigators (PI) and persons of contact (PC) of SuperMUC-NG projects. Here you find explanatory/additional information to both the initial project information letter which you received from LRZ via ticket after approval of your project.

Mentoring Information Letter

Assignment of a Mentor to your Project

Background

Starting with the operation of SuperMUC-NG, LRZ and the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) as well as PRACE offer enhanced support by providing a dedicated mentor for your PRACE project. Mentoring addresses the needs of both, users and LRZ.

The Mentor ...

  • acts as a permanent point of contact and is assigned to each large-scale project.
  • has a detailed understanding of the user’s project, its history, and resource consumption, as well as the project’s associated challenges.
  • should assist the user in the long-term needs for achieving the scientific goals.
  • coordinates communication between users and support staff, and also coordinates efforts in software, performance and IO optimization, long-term data management and visualization.
  • can also coordinate the usage of dedicated resources (block operation, reservation of resources).

The Benefit

The user profits from a more efficient and personalized support structure for his or her project while LRZ benefits from more efficient use of valuable HPC resources.

This is a complementary service while the LRZ Servicedesk (https://doku.lrz.de/display/PUBLIC/Servicedesk+for+SuperMUC-NG) is still the point of contact for immediate issues or service requests concerning the HPC systems.

I have received the name of my mentor. How to proceed?

Your mentor will contact you soon to enquire your project's requirements and status.

Initial Project Information Letter (via Ticket from LRZ)

General
SuperMUC-NGSuperMUC-NG documentation
https://servicedesk.lrz.de/

Please, contact LRZ Servicedesk to report incidents, other technical problems and service requests.

Large-scale projects only
Contact your mentor

Do you have any question, which does not fit into a service request or incident ticket?

Please contact your mentor!

Project Activation Process

The project activation includes the registration of user IDs on SuperMUC-NG in the following groups, which are indexed by the according suffix:

  • permission to use compute ressources: PROJECT_ID-c,
  • creation of directories on LRZ file system: PROJECT_ID-d.

Every day at 8 o’clock the databases are updated by carrying out the provisioning process.

Please consider: The user IDs of your project do not appear in your project view of the LRZ IDM Portal. All user IDs are listed within the general SuperMUC-NG project "hpcusers". You are not project manager of "hpcusers". The user IDs can be found in the new IDM portal for project groups https://idmportal2.sim.lrz.de/ .

User Account Activation Process


RoleAction
Step 1

I am

  • a new user and want to get an account within a particular compute project.
  • a member of an existing project on SuperMUC-NG, but want to get an account in another project on SuperMUC-NG.
Please contact your master user or the principal investigator (PI) or person of contact (PC) of your project.
Step 2master user (PI/PC)

Please open a service request ticket to add/activate new members within your project.

You will receive the user ID and the activation notification for this ID in the relevant project via this ticket. Please provide this information to the user. The user ID of existing users will not change.

Step 3master user (PI/PC)

Important: Both the access to SuperMUC-NG and the data transfer to/from SuperMUC-NG via Globus Online require a static and public IP address of the computer which directly accesses the login nodes of the supercomputer (user's workstation, gateway etc.)!

Please open another service request ticket to activate this IP address.

You will receive a notification about the activation via this ticket.

Step 4user

Steps to access the supercomputer:

  1. Get your initial password: Please call the password reset function of the LRZ IDM Portal. You will need your new user ID to complete the procedure. You need to accept the export control regulations (see below).
  2. Setup your Two-Factor-Authentication (2FA). Please refer to https://doku.lrz.de/two-factor-authentication-on-supermuc-ng-10746550.html
  3. Login to SuperMUC-NG: After doing the password reset, the automatic file system provision procedure will create your HOME and WORK directories at 8 o'clock the next day. Please do not login before that time. You may use the waiting time to become familiar with Access and Login to SuperMUC-NG.
    Note: If your user ID was activated within the scope of another project on SuperMUC-NG, you need to wait approximately one hour after doing the password reset.

Local Project ID

You will need the local project ID for both communication with LRZ and for administrative actions within your project by utilizing the service-request templates at LRZ:

For details please visit Access and Login to SuperMUC-NG.

Password Reset and Export Control Regulations

In case of doing a password reset, the user has to comply with the export control regulations. Additionally, the master user (PI and/or PC) will be asked to comply with those regulations, too. Please visit the section "Richtlinien im HPC-Bereich" at https://www.lrz.de/wir/regelwerk/ to get explanatory information on that topic and usage conditions with respect to the supercomputer at LRZ.

Did you encounter problems with password reset or do you have other technical problems? Please open a ticket via LRZ Servicedesk.

Two-Factor-Authentication (2FA)


In order to improve the security of SuperMUC-NG, LRZ has changed the authentication procedure on all login nodes to two-factor authentication (2FA).

Associated Project Partners

Does your project application list associated project partners, who will also work on the supercomputer in terms of consuming compute time?

If so, then we kindly ask you to send a service request in order to apply for according user IDs.

LRZ distinguishes between project partners and project members.