Information for Prospective SCF Principal Investigators

Any member of the Boston University faculty or academic research staff who requires computational resources for their research may apply for access to the IBM pSeries 690 and 655 systems and the Katana and Intel Pentium III Linux Clusters and related Scientific Computing Facilities (SCF). Access to the IBM Blue Gene system requires first getting a standard SCF account and then following the instructions on the Blue Gene page and is done on an individual basis for each researcher. As a principal investigator on a research project you will be responsible for authorizing individual user accounts, requesting and monitoring the computer usage of your group and updating yearly status reports concerning CPU allocation, funding and publications related to your research.

Your account will initially have the same password on all of the SCF. If you forget your password and need to have it changed, please send email to scfacct@bu.edu.

If other faculty or graduate students are working with you on this project, you will need to add them to your project using the appropriate WWW forms accessible from the Scientific Computing Facilities Resource Requests page. This application should be filed even if the person already has an account on the system (because they are working on some other project) so that we can be put them into your group. Applications can only be filed by the project principal investigator or authorized administrative contact (who also must be a full-time BU faculty or staff member).

We will assign a project name and Unix "group ID" to your project. Your project name will be used in identifying the project against which individual usage is to be charged and is the general way we will identify your project. Please include it in all correspondence with us. The Unix group ID allows you to share files with members of your research team. As a principal investigator you will receive monthly computer usage reports for yourself and the members of your team.

Once a year, you will be asked to fill out a project renewal and allocation request form. We will notify you beginning approximately 60 days prior to your renewal date. If we do not receive the renewal, your project will be marked finished and all accounts associated with the project will be archived to tape and then removed from the system.

We now only accept account and new project requests via the Web. If you have questions, you should send email to scfacct@bu.edu, or contact Aaron Fuegi (aarondf@bu.edu or (617) 353-8255) at the Office of Information Technology, 111 Cummington Street for more information.