RESTRICTED ACCESS: Access to CCR HPC & web portal resources is restricted to the Roswell Park secure networks. You will not be able to access CCR servers and websites from the patient wifi or any other insecure wifi networks at RPCI. Roswell employees who wish to connect to UB CCR from off-campus must first connect to the Roswell VPN. |
Accounts & Access
RPCI researchers and their students and staff are permitted to have access to the RPCI hardware CCR maintains and a shared group directory as part of the RPCI storage purchase. Additional CCR resources may be available for some PI groups depending on affiliation at UB and NIH grant funding.
Access is handled by CCR's ColdFront resource and allocation management portal. Faculty/PIs (i.e. a Roswell Park employee usually with a title of full, assistant or associate Professor) manage a project that includes their staff, postdocs, and students. That project has allocations for resources the group is allowed to access. Staff and students without a qualifying title must be sponsored by a Roswell Park researcher.
New Research Group Setup
STEP 1: ACCOUNTS
RESEARCHERS (Faculty & Principal Investigators):
Anyone with a buffalo.edu or roswellpark.org email address may create themselves a CCR system account following these instructions. Once that's done, if you're the PI make sure to follow the instructions to upgrade your account to PI status. If you're a staff member or student in a research group, let the PI know to add you to their ColdFront project (see below).
| IMPORTANT: University at Buffalo policies forbid the sharing of accounts! It is a violation of UB and CCR policy for users to share their account credentials or access to their account. Please create a separate account for every user you want to have access to CCR servers. |
STEP 2: PROJECT SETUP
Resource Allocation Management Portal
Once your CCR account is created, you will need to create a project in our allocations management system, ColdFront, and request access to the resource(s) you'd like to use. For more information about ColdFront see here
How does the allocation process work?
Groups must have an active allocation for every resource they want to use at CCR. PIs should request allocations for the resources they want to use, CCR staff will activate them, and then PIs will be required to renew the allocations annually. Emails are automatically sent to remind PIs that their allocations are coming up for renewal beginning at 30 days, then again at 14 and 7 days prior to expiration. If the PI does not request renewal before the allocations expire, the group's access to that resource is removed.
Which resources should you request allocations to?
RPCI researchers may request, at a minimum, allocations for:
- 'RPCI (cluster partition)' resource
- 'Project Storage' resource
- 'Global Scratch Storage' resource
There is no cost to individual RPCI research groups to use these services as RPCI and UB have a use agreement in place. In addition to these resources:
- Faculty who have a dual appointment (not be a 'volunteer' appointment) at UB may request an allocation to the 'UB-HPC academic partitions (cluster partition)' resource.
- Faculty who have NIH funding may request an allocation to the 'UB-HPC Academic partitions (cluster partition)' resource and the 'NIH boost (cluster partition)' This will allow your group to run on the UB-HPC cluster nodes and gives a slight priority boost to your group's jobs when running on the UB-HPC academic partitions. You must list your NIH grant in ColdFront in order to qualify for this. We do NOT bill your grant funds for this use.
If you qualify for this access, please request allocations for them.
More on Storage Allocations: Each RPCI research group is provided with a shared project directory but you must request an allocation for the 'Project Storage' resource in ColdFront. Roswell Park researchers will find their group's directory located in: /projects/rpci/[PI_username]
The default quota is 500GB but ultimately RPCI IT divvies up the storage purchased by RPCI. Please consult with Kenneth Quinn at RPCI if your group needs a larger quota.
RPCI users may also request an allocation to CCR's global scratch storage. This provides groups with a 10TB quota on our parallel scratch system to be used for temporary, transient storage while running jobs. This storage is not backed up and we automatically remove files 60 days and older daily. If you're interested in using this, please request an allocation for the 'Global Scratch (storage)' resource in ColdFront. See also:
What to do next?
Once you've received emails from ColdFront that your allocations have been activated, you will be able to access those resources.
RPCI IT requires all new Roswell users to complete the workday learning sessions (ITR: High-performance Computing 101) prior to accessing CCR resources. |
Additional information can be found here: https://u3.roswellpark.org/public/ccr-docs/
This website is only available from within the Roswell network.
How to login to CCR HPC resources
REMINDER on accessing CCR's servers & web portals: Access to CCR resources is restricted to the Roswell Park secure networks. You will not be able to access CCR servers and websites from the patient wifi or any other insecure wifi networks at RPCI. Roswell employees who wish to connect to UB CCR from off-campus must first connect to the Roswell VPN. Note that VPN access requires prior authorization from the Roswell Information Security Office --- requests can be initiated through the Roswell Park Service Now “Request IT” portal.