HPC / ALICE projects
All UoL staff and students have access to ALICE with their normal IT account. This permits them to access the login nodes and run a limited number of simple jobs on the compute cluster. Users who have not registered as an HPC project member can:
- Access Login nodes
- Submit jobs which can run in the short, medium or devel queues
- Have 4 jobs running at a time
- Have 16 more jobs in the queue
HPC projects are available to research postgraduates and staff (and students in certain circumstances). Membership of an HPC project grants access to all resources available on the system and an increased job priority.
More information on running jobs under an HPC account can be found in the Accounts section.
Request an ALICE Project
Requests for ALICE projects are available only to research postgraduates and staff.
The ALICE project structure provides the following benefits:
- Groups ALICE users together by research activity
- Allows us to understand what research the service is being used for
- Track funding sources, where they exist, for the research being carried out
- Provide a structure for allowing data to be shared between collaborating users
- Manage data for users when they leave the University or stop working on a particular project
Register your research project
- Anyone in a supervisory role with a permanent staff account can register a project by going to ithelp.le.ac.uk, clicking ‘Make a request’ then searching for ‘ALICE’, you should see ‘New HPC / ALICE Project’. Click on ‘Request’, fill out the fields and then ‘OK’ at the foot of the form. Include additional Principal Investigators (who must have a permanent staff account) in the 'Additional Details' section.
- If you are a postgraduate you must ask your supervisor to register a project for you or add you to an appropriate existing project.
- Once submitted, the project request will be processed and normally be available within 2-3 days
- Research Projects will be assigned a unique Unix group on ALICE. All associated accounts of a project will have this as a secondary group. The project name is to be used when submitting jobs so that we can track job usage by project.
- Include the usernames of colleagues to be added when the project is created in the 'Additional Details' section.
Request access to an existing ALICE project
Project Principal Investigators (PIs) and their alternative PIs will automatically get access to their ALICE project when their project is approved. Requests for access for new users can come directly from the PI or one of the Project's designated alternative PIs.
A list of existing projects can be found on the Current Research Projects page.
To request access to an existing project, ask the PI (or alternative PI) of the project to raise a request via:
ithelp.le.ac.uk > Make a Request > High Performance Computing > ALICE / HPC project access