Access and Usage Conditions

Access Conditions#

Grex is open to all researchers at University of Manitoba and their collaborators. The main purpose of the Grex system is Research; it might be used for grad studies courses with a strong research component, for their course-based research.

The access and job accounting is by research group; that is, the Principal Investigator (PI)’s accounting group gets resource usage of their group members accounted for. Grex’s resources (CPU and GPU time, disk space, software licenses) are automatically managed by a batch scheduler, SLURM , according to the University’s priorities. There is a process of resource allocation competition (RAC) to get an increased share of Grex resources; however, a “default” share of the resources is available immediately and free of charge by getting an account.

It is expected that Grex accounts and resource allocations are used for the research projects they are requested for.

Owners of the user-contributed hardware on Grex have preferential access to their hardware, which can only be used by the general community of UM researchers when idle and not reserved.

Getting an account on Grex#

As of the moment, Grex is using the Compute Canada (now the Alliance) account management database (CCDB ). Any eligible Canadian Faculty member can get an Alliance account in the CCDB system. If you are a graduate student, doctoral student, postdoctoral fellow, research assistant, undergraduate student, or a non-research staff member, visiting faculty or external collaborator, you will need to be sponsored in CCDB by a Principal Investigator (PI), i.e. a Faculty member. The PI must register in the CCDB first, and then he/she can sponsor you as a “Group Member” under his/her account. Once your application for an Alliance account has been approved, you will receive a confirmation email and you can start using the computing and data storage facilities.

There are two technical conditions for getting access:

  • An active CCDB account.
  • An active CCDB “role” affiliated with UManitoba (University of Manitoba).

Guidelines of the Acceptable Use#

Grex adheres to the Alliance’s Privacy and Security policy , and to University of Manitoba IT Security and Privacy policies

Users that have Grex account have accepted both.

  • In particular, user’s accounts cannot and should not be shared with anyone for whatever reason. Our support staff will never ask for your password.
Sharing any account information (login/password or SSH private keys) leads to immediate blocking of the account. UNIX groups and shared project spaces can be used for data sharing .
  • Usage is monitored and statistics are collected automatically, to estimate the researcher’s needs and future planning, and to troubleshoot day to day operational issues.
  • Users of Grex should be “fair and considerate” in their usage of the systems, trying not to allow for unnecessary and/or inefficient use of the resources or interfering with other users’ work. We reserve to ourselves the right to monitor for inefficient use and ask users to stop their activities if they threaten the general stability of the Grex system.

Getting a Resource Allocation on Grex#

  • Similarly, to the Alliance (formerly known as Compute Canada), there is a two-tier system for resource allocation on Grex. Every group gets a “Default” allocation of Grex resources (computing time and storage space). Groups that need a larger fraction of resources and use Grex intensively, might want to apply for a local Resource Allocation Competition (Grex-RAC).

  • Grex’s local RAC calls are issued once a year. They are reviewed by a local Advanced Research Computing Committee and may be scaled according to the availability of resources. The instructions and conditions of this year’s RAC are provided on the RAC template document (sent via email when the RAC is announced).