Please view this recording if you want to learn more about the features of Coldfront allocations portal, and how PIs can use it to best benefit their groups. (NOTE: This recording is mostly geared towards our faculty). 


ColdFront is an open source resource allocation management tool built for high performance computing centers that allows the management of Center resources and User allocations to those resources.  CCR developed this tool to allow our users the opportunity to request and manage the access they and their students or collaborators have to the many resources in CCR's data center.  





ColdFront consists of 3 parts: Projects, Allocations and Resources





Resources:
- CCR has over 200 distinct resources to track
- Resources include: clusters, department/lab servers, software licenses, storage, and clouds
- Some resources have limits (i.e. storage has a limit of GB, licenses have a limit of seats available)


Allocations:
- Allocations indicate what resources you have access to and any limits associated with that access
- All CCR resources require an allocation
- Allocations expire either by date or when a limit is reached (this information varies and is available when you login to ColdFront)


Projects:
- All faculty members have at least one project
- Projects have a description, field of research, grants, publications, and allocations to resources



ColdFront was designed to be useful in varied HPC environments.  The architecture is extensible and supports various back-ends, job schedulers, ticketing system, and is database agnostic.  CCR's implementation of this open source product interfaces with Open XDMoD (job metrics), SLURM (job scheduler), OpenStack (cloud), Isilon storage reporting, and FreshDesk (ticketing system).





Login to ColdFront using your UB username and CCR password: ColdFront Login


NOTE:  You must be on a UB network (either on campus or connected to the UB VPN) to access this site!





Additional information about the parts of your project record can be found here:

 

Creating a new project - new faculty users


Creating a new project - existing faculty users

 

Requesting new allocations

 

Adding users to your project and/or allocation


Removing users from your project and/or allocation

 

Annual project review


Renewing allocations to resources