Anyone with a valid accreditation at EPFL can request an account on our facilities.
See also: Prices and SLAs.
Accounts for researchers
Free
Any user can request an account free of charge. The following limits are currently applied to the user:
- maximum wall clock time: 6 hours
- maximum number of nodes used per job: 1
- low priority access
Limits can change without notice.
To ask for a free account, please fill in the appropriate form via our Service request forms.
Pay-per-use
Account creation for lab or project : pay-per-use accounts are charged for their real usage of the system. The fees are eligible for FNS and ERC as service costs.
Monthly invoices will be sent to the lab. The invoices can be sent to FNS and ERC for reimbursement.
The following limits are enforced to prevent excessive CPU time usage:
- maximum wall clock time: 72 hours (3 days)
- maximum number of nodes per job: 8
Pay-per-use users’ jobs are scheduled with an elevated priority compared to Free users’ jobs. Pay-per-use accounts are not specific to one cluster.
The head of the laboratory can submit a request to raise these limits temporarily.
To move from a Free to a Pay-per-use account, please ask the head of the laboratory to fill in the appropriate form via our Service request forms.
If you already have a Pay-per-use account and would like to delete it, please submit your request via this form: Pay-per-use account deletion.
Reservations for research emergencies
Nodes reservations for emergencies (end of thesis, conference or paper submission deadline, etc.) can be requested by filling in the appropriate form via our Service request forms.
The cost is twice the price of the Pay-per-use cost and all reserved CPU time will be invoiced even if it is not used.
We can allocate to reservations a total of maximum 40 nodes.
The maximum duration of a reservation is 2 weeks.
Accounts for students
Classes and workshops
It is possible to make reservations on our facilities for classes or workshops.
All requests should be submitted via the appropriate form on our Service request forms page. Further to your request, you will be contacted by a member of the SCITAS team.
More details are available here.
Master or Bachelor projects
Bachelor and Master students can request a student account on our facilities by filling in the appropriate form via our Service request forms. The students must indicate their supervisor’s name. SCITAS will contact the supervisor for validation and then create the account.
A total of 4’000 CHF (~300’000 core hours on CPU nodes or ~11’000 gpu hours on graphical nodes) are available to the student. After the 4’000 CHF are consumed, the lab can either pay for the additional hours or the student account is commuted into a free account.
Students working in labs that have shares on the machines have the possibility to access the lab’s shares. This must be indicated in the form as a remark.
External collaborators
External collaborators can have an account provided they have an accreditation within the lab they are collaborating with. In order to give access to your external collaborators, ask your administrative assistant to accredit them in your lab with status “Outside EPFL” (“Hors EPFL”) with a GASPAR username and password.
Accounts created through the https://guests.epfl.ch/ portal cannot be used for access to the clusters.