The UserDB is the portal containing all User Accounts and Project Accounts and where CINECA users can manage their profile and monitor their computational resources.
In case your Name or Surname contain special (non ASCII) characters, please use the corresponding ASCII one
Once the registration is completed and you have set the password of your UserDB credentials, please go to my User, click on Edit and complete your profile:
upload a valid Identity document (Passport, ID, Italian driving license) in Documents for HPC page and sign the CINECA Access policies;
insert your affiliation in Institution page.
You can use the UserDB credentials to login to UserDB. Alternatively, you can also use your HPC credentials with 2FA by clicking on OpenID button.
Warning
Each user can have only one profile on UserDB.
If the profile already exists or the email is already used you need to recover your previous profile by clicking
on Request new password and inserting the email that you used to register the first time.
Write to superc@cineca.it for any issues.
Once the steps above are all completed you can request us to create a User Account by going to the page HPC Access and click Submit.
Warning
If the Submit button does not appear, it means that one or more of the above steps are still not completed.
In the HPC Access page, the portal will indicate you which step is still not OK.
We will receive your request and after a check of the inserted data we will grant you access to our HPC resources.
Within 24 hours you will receive via email the information needed to set your HPC credentials:
your User account name (or HPC username)
a link to setup your 2FA access (the link will be valid only for 12h)
HPC credentials are different from the UserDB credentials. The former are needed to access CINECA HPC and Cloud infrastructures, while the latter are only to be used inside the UserDB portal.
Caution
Both HPC credentials and UserDB credentials are strictly personal and for any reasons cannot be shared with others.
Each Project Account has a PI (Principal Investigator). The PI is usually who have applied for obtaining the budget and is responsible of everything that happens using that account.
Each Project Account may have one or more Collaborators. The PI can add autonomously collaborators to its account.
The Collaborator needs to be registered on UserDB. To add the Collaborator, the PI needs to go to the page of the Project Account visible
in the My projects page and click on Edit. In the Collaborators section, insert the UserDB username in a blank line and click on the correct name of the collaborator among the ones proposed by the appearing scroll-down menu.
Important
For any issues in finding the collaborator, please write to superc@cineca.it
Warning
If the PI of the project account is registered to UserDB but is not yet approved to access the cluster (HPC STATUS: Not Configured), the project is not loaded on the infrastructure and collaborators may not be able to access the cluster. Once the PI is approved, the project account will be activated.
Each approved grant is uniquely identified by a Project Account name. Each Project Account is provided with at least one budget, usually in standard core hours (STDH) for HPC clusters or VCPUs for Cloud resources, on a specific CINECA cluster. A Project Account may have multiple budgets on different CINECA systems.
A User Account may be associated as Principal Investigator (PI) or as Collaborator to one or multiple Project Accounts.
In the context of HPC (High-Performance Computing) resources, budget refers to the allocation of some computational resources granted to a Project Account. The resources differs if the Project is defined on HPC or Cloud systems.
The utilization of our High-Performance Computing (HPC) resources operates within a “pay-per-use” framework.
Usually short interactive serial jobs run on login nodes for testing incur no charges.
Parallel and Production simulations instead must be executed on compute nodes by submitting jobs to a scheduler.
Compute nodes of a HPC system are usually divided into different partitions. Some partitions may be free of charge.
Please check on Cluster Specifics section for the available partitions and their cost on the cluster where you have budget.
On UserDB all the budgets are expressed in standard core-hours. On the cluster they are translated into local core-hours. The convertion factor depends on the different cost of a single core-hour among the available clusters.
Each approved Project Account may have multiple budgets on several clusters. In this case the budget name may differ among the clusters. Please check with the command saldo the correct name of your budget on the specific cluster.
Further information about how to check the availabe saldo of a project are reported in the Budget and Accounting section.
On CINECA clusters a budget linearization policy is enforced. A detailed description is found in the specific Budget Linearization section.
Cloud budget is assinged in Virtual CPUs (VCPUs) and Storage Your accounts are in the menu on the top left in Horizon Dashboard.
Project accounts allocated in UserDB have a fixed duration. Once reached the end date, the account enters a so called expired status.
In the expired period, the budget cannot be used to submit jobs, but the data in the project specific areas are preserved.
The expiration duration depends on the kind of project. Usually it is 6 months for HPC accounts and 1 month for Cloud accounts, but in special cases it may differ.
At the end of the expiration delay all the data in the project specific areas are deleted.
In the UserDB portal, the users can manage the following information:
Changing the UserDB password
Request a new UserDB password
Update the affiliation
Note
It is not possible to update the email address directly on UserDB. The change has to be made on SSO portal and the UserDB will automatically update the email (see Manage your HPC credentials).
How to change the UserDB password
Login to UserDB portal, then click on Edit. Insert the Current Password and then below the New Password. If the quality is Good, click on Save at the bottom of the page.
If you do not remember the password you can reset it by clicking on Request new password.
You will be asked to insert the email that you used to register on UserDB.
The portal will send you an email with a link to set a new password.
Note
If you insert a different email address, you will not receive any link.
How to update the affiliation
Any time you chnge your affiliation if you still make use of CINECA resources, we kindly ask you to update your affiliation.
Login to UserDB portal, click on Edit and then on Institution and update it.
The passwd command has been disabled.
If you still need to configure your 2FA but you don’t remember the password, or your password is expired, the above solutions will not work. Please write to superc@cineca.it in order to solve the issue.
Within 24 hours the email will be updated also on UserDB portal.
Warning
Users cannot change their email address directly on the UserDB portal.
If you encounter issues while attempting to update your email address, please contact superc@cineca.it for assistance.
Recover OTP One-Time Code Generator
If you lost access to your OTP generator, you can configure a new one using the recovery authentication codes saved during the initial OTP setup.
After inserting username and password on SSO login procedure, the page will request the One-Time Password. Click on Try another way.
choose Recovery Authentication Code
Insert the requested Recovery Code (obtained during the first configuration of the OTP).
Note
The system requires a specific recovery code of the list of available codes. It is identified by the “#<number>” on top of the Recovery code field.
In the above example it is asking the first (#1) recovery code of the list.
Important
Renew the recovery codes: It is also possible to generate new recovery codes by clicking on Set up Recovery authentication codes in the section Recovery authentication codes of Account Security page.
If you change the password on the portal sso.hpc.cineca.it, it will be automatically changed on all the clusters (the propagation can take up to one hour).
Here we report the HPC password policies:
The new password has to be at least 10 characters long and contains at least 1 capital letter, 1 number, and 1 special character (!”#$%&’()*+,-./:;<=>?@[]^_`{|}~)
The password has a validity of 3 months. You will receive a reminder 10 days before the expiration when you login.
The new password has to be different from the previous 5 ones.
Any password change will be notified to the user by email.
