Account Consolidation Guide

Initial account consolidation took place during the July 17th, 2018 downtime. 
Please contact OSC Help if you need further information. 

Single Account / Multiple Projects

If you work with several research groups, you had a separate account for each group. This meant multiple home directories, multiple passwords, etc. Over the years there have been requests for a single login system. We've now put that in place.

How will this affect you?

If you work with multiple groups, you'll need to be aware of how this works.

  • It will be very important to use the correct project code for batch job charging.
  • Managing the sharing of files between your projects (groups) is a little more complicated.
  • In most cases, you will only need to fill out software license agreements once.

The single username 

We requested those with multiple accounts to choose a preferred username. If one was not selected by the user, we selected one for them. 

The preferred username will be your only active account; you will not be able to log in or submit jobs with the other accounts. 

Checking the groups of a username

To check all groups of a username (USERID), use the command:

groups USERID

or

OSCfinger USERID

The first one from the output is your primary group, which is the project code (PROJECTID) this username (USERID) was created under.

All project codes your user account is under is determined by the groups displayed. One can also use the OSC Client Portal to look at their current projects.

A user may not be a member of the project, even though the user is still in the group for that project. This is because a primary group will not be removed when a user is removed from their first project. OSCfinger will list a primary group and project groups separately (if a user the primary group, but the project is not listed in the 'groups' sectionm then they are not in that project). OSC Client portal will also show current project members.

Changing the primary group for a login session

You can change the primary group of your username (USERID) to any UNIX group (GROUP) that username (USERID) belongs to during the login session using the command:

newgrp GROUP

This change is only valid during this login session. If you log out and log back in, your primary group is changed back to the default one.

Check previous user accounts

There is no available tool to check all of your previous active accounts. We sent an email to each impacted user providing the information on your preferred username and previous accounts. Please refer to that email (sent on July 11, subject "Multiple OSC Accounts - Your Single Username").

Batch job

How to specify the charging project

It will be very important that you make sure a batch job is charged against the correct research project code.

Specify a project to charge the job to using the -A flag. e.g. The following example will charge to project PAS1234.

#SBATCH -A PAS1234

Batch limits policy

The job limit per user remains the same. That is to say, though your jobs are charged against different project codes, the total number of jobs and cores your user account can use on each system is still restricted by the previous user-based limit. Therefore, consolidating multiple user accounts into one preferred user account may affect the work of some users.

Please check our batch limit policy on each system for more details.

Data Management

Managing multiple home directories

Data from your non-preferred accounts will remain in those home directories; the ownership of the files will be updated to your preferred username, the newly consolidated account. You can access your other home directories using the command cd /absolute/path/to/file

You will need to consolidate all files to your preferred username as soon as possible because we plan to purge the data in future. Please contact OSC Help if you need the information on your other home directories to access the files.  

Previous files associated with your other usernames

  • Files associated with your non-preferred accounts will have their ownership changed to your preferred username. 
  • These files won't count against your home directory file quota. 
  • There will be no change to files and quotas on the project and scratch file systems.

Change group of a file

Log in with preferred username (P_ USERID) and create a new file of which the owner and group is your preferred username (P_ USERID) and primary project code (P_PROJECTID). Then change the group of the newly created file (FILE) using the command:

chgrp PROJECTID FILE

Managing file sharing in a batch job

In the Linux file system, every file has an owner and a group. By default, the group (project code) assigned to a file is the primary group of the user who creates it. This means that even if you change the charged account for a batch job, any files created will still be associated with your primary group.

To change the group for new files you will need to update your primary group prior to submitting your slurm script using the newgrp command.

It is important to remember that groups are used in two different ways: for resource use charging and file permissions. In the simplest case, if you are a member of only one research group/project, you won't need either option above. If you are in multiple research groups and/or multiple projects, you may need something like:

newgrp PAS0002
sbatch -A PAS0002 myjob.sh

OnDemand users

If you use the OnDemand Files app to upload files to the OSC filesystem, the group ownership of uploaded files will be your primary group.

Software licenses

  • We will merge all your current agreements if you have multiple accounts.  
  • In many cases, you will only need to fill out software license agreements once.
  • Some vendors may require you to sign an updated agreement.  
  • Some vendors may also require the PI of each of your research groups/project codes to sign an agreement.
Supercomputer: 
Owens
Pitzer