Go to the register link. Note that you will have to accept the Compute Canada AUP (Acceptable Use Policy) to obtain your account.

There are two types of role:

• sponsor roles (often referred to as Primary Investigators or PIs), and
• sponsored roles.

Only faculty members can be sponsors. Administrators who are not faculty but who lead research projects must contact accounts@computecanada.ca so that we can make appropriate accommodations. Faculty roles are only granted to faculty from Canadian post-secondary academic institutions who are eligible for CFI funding.

Sponsored roles fall into two groups:

• internal, and
• external.

The difference is in whether the applicant is part of the supervisors local group, or a collaborator from a different institution.

All students in the group should select the appropriate student position (undergraduate, masters, doctoral). Non-students should select the appropriate position from postdoctoral fellow, researcher (but only if the person is actually paid by the PI’s institution to work as part of the group—all other associates should apply as “External Collaborator”) or non-research staff (e.g. administrators, secretaries, etc.—people who do not typically need access to compute resources).

All collaborators who are not formally part of the PI’s group should apply as external collaborators. An external collaborators is anyone working with the group who the PI is willing to sponsor. Note however that external collaborators must specify an institution different from that of the PI. If they are eligible for another role corresponding to a different position then they should select that position instead.

First, you will get an e-mail message with a link in it that you need to click on to confirm that the e-mail address you gave is valid. Next, someone will be sent an e-mail which asks them to approve your application. Everyone needs to be confirmed by someone. If you are a faculty member or non-research staff (typically consortium or Compute Canada staff) your application will be approved by consortium staff. Otherwise your application will be approved by the faculty member that you selected as your sponsor.

Before you can get an account at a regional HPC consortium, you must first sumbit a request for a Compute Canada Database (CCDB) account. Detailed instructions can be found on our Registering with the CCDB page.  

Once you have your CCDB login name and password, you can login to the CCDB website, click on "My Account" from the main navigation bar and from the dropdown menu that appears, select "Apply for a consortium account". There, you will find a list of the consortia with links to click on to get an account at that consortium. If you have any questions or difficulties finding this page, please contact accounts@computecanada.ca.

A CCI (Compute Canada Identifier) is a unique personal and national identifier. This is the identity you are required to bring to any of the regional HPC consortia when you apply for a local account. Your CCI is different from the local usernames given to you by the regional consortia. You can register for a CCI at https://ccdb.computecanada.ca.

A role is an identifier that represents the combination of a person’s position (eg. Faculty, Graduate Student, Postdoctoral Fellow, etc.), institution, and sponsor. In order to access Compute Canada resources one must have a valid and up-to-date role. A Compute Canada Role Identifier (CCRI) is associated with each role and uniquely identifies it. Most people will only have one role at a time, but when you change institution, sponsor, or position you will need to apply for a new role rather than update the old one. We ask you to do this so we can maintain accurate records for usage reporting to our governmental funding agencies.

RAP is short for Research Allocation Project. Researchers are usually working on at least one research project. For reporting purposes, we need to be able to provide statistics on how our facilities are used, but the word “project” is too ambiguous, therefore we use a name which does not have any implicit meanings. Also, computing resources are not allocated to individuals, they are allocated to groups of researchers. The RAP is the group of researchers which resources are allocated to. Most users will just have one RAP which gets a base allocation. Some researchers will have additional resource allocations, allocated to an additional RAP.