Introduction#
Digital Research Alliance of Canada (the Alliance) is a Canadian National Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) organization (formerly known as Compute Canada). It provides the eligible researchers with the research computing resources such as several High-performance computing (HPC) systems with a large curated HPC software stack , private OpenStack cloud, and Globus data transfer software.
The Alliance also maintains a user authentication service and usage database called CCDB. On Grex, we rely on CCDB for accessing our system. The first step to get started with Grex is to register for an Alliance account at the CCDB website (if you do not already have one).
The Digital Research Alliance of Canada on the Web#
- Digital Research Alliance of Canada official website
- Alliance database CCDB
- Alliance user documentation Wiki
- Status page for the Alliance clusters
Getting an account with the Alliance#
University of Manitoba Faculty members are eligible for getting an account with the Alliance. Once it is obtained, they can manage accounts of their group members in CCDB.
If you are a postdoc, a student or an external collaborator, you can apply for an account as part of the Faculty’s group. You will need your PI’s CCDB role identifier code (CCRI). For more information, please follow this guide .
The account will allow you to manage your roles and groups in CCDB, to access National HPC and Cloud machines, as well as few other services such as Globus and NextCloud .
Since we have switched Grex to CCDB credentials in late 2019, the CCDB account is both necessary and sufficient to access Grex.
- WestGrid accounts are no longer needed, nor working on Grex. Please use CCDB accounts for both Grex and DRAC systems!
- WestGrid network addresses in the westgrid.ca domain are no longer nor used on Grex. Please use hpc.umanitoba.ca domain!
Alliance’s clusters and services#
Regional Partners#
The regional partners of the Alliance are: BC DRI group and Prairies DRI group, which consists of institutional members belonging to Western Canada (former WestGrid institutions), Compute Ontario, Calcul Quebec and AceNET which is a consortium of universities of Maritime provinces.
- BC DRI group
- Prairies DRI group
- Compute Ontario
- Calcul Quebec
- AceNET
University of Manitoba is a member institution of Prairies DRI group, and provides a site for the Alliance support staff that support usage of the National DRI by Manitoba researchers and their collaborators.
Getting support#
The single point of contact for Alliance (Compute Canada) support is: support@tech.alliancecan.ca
When requesting support, please make sure to include enough information that will help support staff to identify your issue in order to solve it in time. An example of details to include in your email are (but not limited to): user name, name of the cluster, job id if applicable, job script, list of the modules, a path to your files and scripts, … etc. You may include any other details that may help to understand your issue.