CSC accounts and projects

To access any of CSC computing and many of the storage services, a CSC account is needed.

Every CSC account must be linked with a CSC project, which enables you to share resources and data among your group. A project needs a project manager, who creates the project, manages the user accounts and services that belong to the project and is responsible of the resource usage. The project manager is typically a leader of a research team or other senior researcher.

CSC services are free of charge for open science at Finnish higher education institutions and research institutes.

• CSC Docs: Accounts and projects

• LUMI, get started

• CSC, LUMI high performance computing services offer companies a competitive advantage

Course project

You can now also create so called course project for use in education.

Note:

• Course projects are valid for maximum 6 months

• Projects cannot be extended

• Project data will be deleted when the project has ended

CSC Docs: Course project

Managing resources

Your first steps into many CSC services goes via MyCSC:

• Create an account

• Manage your account

  • Keep it alive by password update once a year

• Manage your projects/services

• Estimate billing units

• Change password

• …

Billing units

• CPU time and storing files consume “Billing units” (BU)

• BUs are a property of computing projects not users

• Monitor the BU usage with command csc-projects in the command line

  • For help/options, try csc-projects -h

• Batch job billing scheme:

  • Amount of resources allocated: All requested resources are billed ie. number of cores, amount of memory

  • Time allocated: Resources are billed based on the actual (wall) time a job has used, not the reserved maximum time

• CSC Docs: Billing units

• LUMI Docs: Billing policy

Applying for billing units

• Billing units can be also applied via My Projects page in MyCSC

  • Please acknowledge the use of CSC resources in your publications (CSC Docs: CSC Acknowledgement); many tools pages also provide a copyable acknowledgement examples (see for example CSC Docs: QGIS Acknowledgement)

  • Please also inform us about your work by adding your publications to the resource application!

• Academic usage is one of the free-of-charge use cases

• You can estimate usage with the online billing calculator

  • The calculator can also be used to estimate the value of the resources