What things can I get with a Research Computing Service (RCS)/High-Performance Computing (HPC) account?

With an RCS/HPC account, you have access to UNT’s HPC resources. This includes Talon, UNT’s flagship supercomputing cluster with over 8,300 CPU cores, over 1.4 PB of storage space, and 150,000 GPU-accelerated cores. This computing cluster can be used for scientific research, classroom assignments, and other special projects that can be enhanced by HPC resources.

HPC consulting services are offered for anyone from members of our highly skilled HPC staff members. This includes any help using the HPC resources for their research needs.

Any special requests can be made by contacting the HPC staff at hpc-admin@unt.edu.

Who is eligible for a RCS/HPC account?

Any UNT faculty, students, postdocs, research fellows, and external visiting scholars is eligible for an account to UNT’s HPC resources. Principal Investigators (PI) can receive allocations with their account request to run their calculations on the computing resources. All other users (i.e. students, external scholar, etc.) can also apply for an account but must be sponsored by a UNT faculty-level PI.

Every HPC account holder MUST have an active UNT AMS EUID to apply. If you are an external visiting scholar/collaborator you can apply for a UNT AMS account (EUID) through the Office of the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs by filling out the Visiting Scholar/Researcher EMPLID/EUID Request Form (VPAA-40a) and following directions from the Office of the Provost.

Accounts CANNOT be shared with anyone. Each user requires an individual account.

How do I apply for an account?

Each user is required to fill out an RCS Account Request form online. Access to the form requires authentication with valid UNT credentials, your EUID and AMS password.

What allocations are available for RCS/HPC accounts?

To run calculations on HPC resources, users must have an active allocation. There are two types of allocations that users can request.

Research

Research allocations are given to faculty or staff PI’s to conduct any project that require access to HPC resources. Any faculty or staff PI can request an Research allocation when filling out an Account Request form online. All requests go through approval by the HPC staff and typical accounts and allocations are awarded within 1-2 business days. At the end of each academic year, each Research allocation is audited to asses if the allocation is renewed for the following year. Typically, this involves the HPC staff contacting the PI, confirming their account as active and the users under their allocation are active. Confirmation is required to keep their allocation active as well as the users under their allocation. Any allocation/account that become inactive can contact hpc-admin@unt.edu to reenable their allocation. 

Typically, a PI’s research is funded by the PI's grant awards. The dollar amount generated by a PI’s external grants will determinate initial priority within the Talon 3 job queueing system.

Students and Post-Docs cannot request a new Research Allocation, but they can be added to an already existing Research allocation, headed by a faculty or staff PI. Students and Post-Docs requesting HPC accounts will need to list a faculty or staff PI Sponsor when filling out an Account Request form. Once a request is made, the PI of the Research allocation will be contacted for approval. Then, the student/Post-Doc will have their account created under their Sponsor’s Research Allocation.

NOTE: The PI/Sponsor of the Research allocation will be responsible for any activity of all users using the allocation. The PI/Sponsor can request to disable a user’s access to the allocation at any time or request access to any data generated by any user under their allocation.

Academic

Academic allocations are rewarded to UNT class lectures for a course that can take use of HPC resources. These allocations are headed by the lectures and students taking the course can request accounts to be created. The allocations are only active during the duration of the course.

If a lecture want access to HPC resources for a course, please contact hpc-admin@unt.edu at least one month before the course starts to ensure the Academic allocations are ready when the course starts. 

As an added service provided to Academic allocations, a member of the HPC or DSA staff can take over a class if the lecture is out for any reason (i.e. out of town meeting or conference). Instead of canceling class, we can provide a lecture over various HPC, programing, and statistical methodology topics. The HPC staff can also give a Talon 3 User Orientation to a class especially if students will heavily use Talon 3 during their coursework. Please contact the HPC staff in advance if you would like to use this service.