Allocation and Account Administration

Requesting an Allocation

Faculty and staff at TGI institutions are eligible to request allocations on the TGI RAILS system. To apply, completion of a data service request is the first step. Once approved, you can continue to submit a proposal for a project on the system, and for that, the PI must have an NCSA account. If you do not have an NCSA account please use this link to request an account. Once your NCSA is setup you can submit a proposal using the NCSA XRAS interface. The proposal will need to include a title, a short abstract suitable for posting on public web sites, the TGI institution, a statement of the project goals and an estimate of allocation needed. After submission the proposal will be reviewed by a reviewer designated by TGI and once approved, the project will be created in the NCSA management systems and on TGI RAILS. Please note that these last two steps do involve some manual steps which can take up to five business days to complete (depending on staff availability).

Managing Users

PIs may add and remove users to their allocation using the NCSA group management interface. PIs can delegate the ability to manage users to other project members once those accounts are added to the project. Please refer to this page for additional documentation on the group management interface.

Account and Group

Each user of TGI RAILS must obtain an NCSA account and Duo software token. To get an account a PI (or allocation manager) must add you to their project via the instructions in the previous section. Each RAILS user will be a member of at least one allocated project which will map to a group on the RAILS system. Note that your account will automatically be removed from the system when your project expires. Make sure you transfer any data you need off the system before the account is removed!

Management Tools

You can manage your NCSA identity (change email, password, Duo device, etc) and project PIs and allocation managers can add or remove accounts to their project with the NCSA Identity and NCSA group management tools.

Configuring Your Account

  • Bash is the default shell, submit a support request to change your default shell

  • Environment variables: SLURM batch

  • Using modules/lmod

Allocation Policies

  • TGI awarded projects and allocations currently do not receive periodic messages regarding approaching project expiration.

  • Projects will no longer be able to run jobs after their project expires or their allocation is exhausted.

  • There is a 0-day grace-period for expired RAILS projects to allow for data management access only.

  • Following the grace period expired projects will be removed from the system and project data removed.

  • Any accounts no longer on an active project are removed from the system and their home directory data removed.

Allocation Supplements and Extensions

Requests for resource allocation supplements (compute, GPU, or storage)and extensions can be made via the appropriate XRAS website.

  • TGI allocation PIs can find instructions for requesting supplements and extensions at the bottom of the Delta Allocations page. While that page documents the process for Delta projects, the process is the same for TGI RAILS projects.