What You Need to Obtain an Account
There are several account types: PI, User, and Commercial. There are no fees for PI and User accounts.
PI Accounts
All researchers in the province of Ontario with funded research grants may apply for a PI (Principal Investigator) account. PI is responsible for the use of all user accounts they sponsor. Resources allocated are fair share access to the system compute resources, 1GB of home directory space and access to all publically available tools and data for current availability.
User Accounts
User accounts must be sponsored by a PI.
Extra resource allocation
Resources above and beyond the standard offering may be obtained by one of two methods.
- Enter into a collaborative agreement with one of the cluster sponsors
- Contract the systems group at the CCB to help acquire and manage extra resources within the bounds of what the systems group can support.
You will need to apply for an account to get access to the CCBHPF.
The CCBHPF provides access to applications, datasets and compute power by the command line.
You will need an ssh client to log in to your account. Once logged in, you can compile and run jobs interactively (for short jobs) or submit them for execution in our batch system. You may also run our publically accessible applications. You may not run network services to systems outside of the HPF cluster.
Files can be transferred to or from the cluster using scp.
Telnet, ftp, rlogin and other protocols may not be used to gain access to CCBHPF resources owing to inherent insecurities. However, scp/sftp/rsync over ssh clients is available to users to "fetch" data from external sources to HPF. These same clients must be used on user desktops to transfer to/from HPF to/from their desktop. Be aware that for users on the Hospital for Sick Children network, kidnet, the desktop client must initiate the transfer. HPF cannot be used to initiate a data transfer into the hospital network due to the Hospital firewall.
Obtaining an ssh client
Almost all current Linux and Unix-like operating systems, including Macintosh OS X, contain ssh and scp as part of their normal installations. Just open a terminal window and enter the command
ssh your-ccbhpf-username@hpf.ccb.sickkids.ca
and you will be prompted for your assigned password. If you are prompted with a question relating to "the authenticity of the host cannot be established" on your first connection attempt, answer Y or YES.
For Microsoft Windows operating systems, ssh and scp can be obtained for free from several sources. You may wish to consider:
These links are provided for the convenience of users. The Hospital for Sick Children and the Centre For Computational Biology do not endorse any product or enterprise. You must determine whether terms and conditions are acceptable for your use.
