Chapter 2: Getting an Account | KAUST Supercomputing Lab

The KAUST Supercomputing Laboratory manages three user account entities: organisations, projects, and users. Every Shaheen user must be an official member of at least one project, and every project must originate from an approved organisation.

Organisation approval

In addition to KAUST faculty and students, access to Shaheen is available to a select group of academic and industry partners. Each external organisation must have submitted a completed Organisation Access Application before its account requests or project proposals can be considered.

The Organisation Access Application documents the agreement that the external organisation will abide by the terms and conditions of using Shaheen. These terms and conditions have implications for the authorisation of users and the approval of research topics, some of which are stipulated by the associated export licence.

Project proposal

Every user account must be associated with at least one project. The Project Proposal defines a principal investigator (PI), describes the purpose of the project, lists the resources required, and provides a list of initial members.

The forms can be found at Account Applications.

An approved project is assigned a project identifier of the form "[a-z][0-9]+", (e.g., k1000). This project id is linked to a unix group and project directory of the same name. You can see what projects you are a member of with the groups command.

Projects fall into two general categories: development and production.

Pre-Production/Development projects

Projects that do no have the ability or need to utilise significant resources at scale are called "development" projects. Typical development projects include:

software development
code porting
code scaling
benchmarking
platform familiarisation

Production projects

Projects that require substantial resources or use established code are considered "production" projects. Production projects are subject to additional review by a Research Computing Allocation Committee (RCAC). Applicants for production projects will asked to demonstrate code scalability (e.g., as part of an existing development project). Projects requesting access to more than 2 million core-hours may be considered a "production" project.

Additional Allocations and/or Time Extensions

PIs are requested to submit a report detailing progress to date including details of any papers etc. that have been produced along with a justification for the request. In most cases these will need to be referred to the RCAC for approval.

Account request

Each user is allocated a single user account identifier. The most familiar elements of the user account are the username and password, but further information is collected via the Account Request form, including proof of nationality.

Charging rates

Submission

Use the Contact Us form to submit credentials or other private information.