User Accounts

Requesting an Account

Access can be provided to members (PIs, post-doctoral research staff and postgraduate students) of research groups / departments or schools that have contributed to the CSF, or alternatively on a free at the point of use basis.

Check with your Supervisor or Principal Investigator (PI) whether they are a contributor or not, and then email its-ri-team@manchester.ac.uk or fill in the HPC Help form, supplying the following information:

  • The name of the system you wish to access – in this case the CSF
  • A brief description of why you want to use the CSF
  • Your University IT Username (not password)
  • The email address(*) of your PI/supervisor/line manager
    • Oct 2024: Please note, the new Connect Portal “account request form” has made the “Secondary Supervisor” a mandatory field. If you don’t have a secondary supervisor, just enter your “Primary Supervisor” again.
  • Please also CC your supervisor on email requests

*NOTE: We do not usually need to contact your supervisor. The email address helps us to identify which area of storage and resources on the CSF your account will have access to.

There is some limited free at the point of use access if you are not part of a contributing group. The maximum job size is smaller for “f@pou” users.

Visitors/Collaborators

Vistors to, and collaborators with, contributing research groups may have access to the CSF provided they have been registered by the Principal Investigator/an Academic Sponsor with People and Organisational Development (P&OD, previously “H.R.”) (or Student Administration if appropriate) at the Univerisity of Manchester.

Step 1: Please contact your Faculty / School administration team to begin the process of registering your visitor/collaborator with P&OD. Please note: the Research Infrastructure team/IT Services CANNOT register your collaborator with P&OD. The sponsoring academic must do this through their school/department.

Please start this process as soon as possible to ensure that everything is in place in plenty of time for when your collaborator/visitor wishes to begin using the CSF.

Step 2: Please tell us your visitor’s UoM username. We, Research IT, DO NOT issue/generate your visitor’s UoM username. This is done via the P&OD (H.R.) process, and you or your visitor will be informed of the username. We CANNOT create the CSF account until YOU can tell us your visitor/collaborator’s UoM username!

Technically, the P&OD and student administration systems feed into the IT Services admin systems. IT Services cannot simply “give you an account.” The process must be initiated by P&OD.

Step 3: The visitor/collaborator must then complete the IT Sign Up, where they agree to the University IT policies and set up their DUO two-factor authentication preferences.

Once you’ve communicated your visitor’s UoM IT username to us, Research IT, we’ll setup the CSF account and send further details on how to access and use the system to your visitor.

Access to some software on the CSF may not be possible, or extra conditions may apply, depending on the software license. All users of the CSF must adhere to software licenses.

Extensions to user accounts

Your University IT username will automatically expire at the end of your course or contract. This cuts off your access to all IT Services systems, including the CSF.

If you have a requirement to continue to access the CSF (and other IT systems) then your Principal Investigator/supervisor must arrange with their local administration team to have your HR/student record extended for an appropriate period of time. When that has been done, the IT user database will be automatically updated and you will be able to log in to the CSF again.

There is no such thing as a “CSF extension”. You must have the end date on your UoM IT account extended, and this will automatically make your CSF access work again.

If you are a graduating student, you can find information about your general IT access (including files in your P-Drive, OneDrive and emails) after your leave date on the Information for graduating students webpage on the IT Services website. This page includes a list of “School Contacts.” Your first point of contact to arrange any IT access extension should be your School.

Please note that Research Infrastructure/IT Services cannot authorise an extension – it is a matter for your PI/supervisor, department and H.R/Student records.

What happens to my account at the end of my course / research?

CSF user accounts are not automatically deleted when your UoM IT account expires, although login will not be possible. Files in your CSF home area (or other research data storage areas that your group may have) are safe. Data on the scratch filesystem will be subject to the usual scratch cleanup policy. You should ensure you copy any valuable results (files) from scratch to RDS storage before you leave. So, for example, if you have just graduated but will be returning in September to begin a PhD, your CSF home and RDS files will still be there, but your scratch files might not be.

We periodically archive old user accounts (compressing the files in to an archive file) and will contact the supervisor / PI of that user informing them that this has been done. Access to these old files by the supervisor / PI can be requested. This frees up disk-space in a supervisor’s group home storage area on the CSF for active users.

IT Policies and Regulations

All users must have completed IT Sign Up to be granted an account on the CSF and follow IT policies and regulations.

Last modified on October 9, 2024 at 1:42 pm by George Leaver