ARC Account Lifecycle

This article provides some context and orientation regarding ARC account lifecycles.

Requires VT-PID

ARC accounts are based on Virginia Tech PID (VT-PID) account and make use of centralized VT authentication. This means that a valid VT-PID is required and logins to ARC systems are authenticated with VT-PID username and password plus DUO second factor.

All current faculty, staff, and students at VT have a VT-PID. In addition, people external to Virginia Tech can get a “sponsored VT-PID” when that is requested by someone at VT.

Creation/Activation

Anyone with an active VT-PID can request access to ARC system. The account creation form will require you to confirm your acceptance of VT usage policies, and then create your account.

This provides the ability to log in to ARC systems and stubs out account components for you. To become fully functional, you will need to have access to a Project, its Compute allocation account, and optionally additional storage.

Our Getting started page gives a broader orientation to getting started with research computing at ARC.

Continued Access

For an ARC account to remain active, we look at activity on ARC systems over the past 12 months. One deciding factor is whether you’re actively using ARC computational systems For example, if the account still running jobs on ARC systems, then that account should not be deactivated. Occupying storage space on ARC systems is not considered “active” use of the computational systems.

Deactivation

If you wish to deactive your account, you can do so via this ColdFront account deletion page.

Note

All users who have an active ARC account are required to be on the ARC-users email list. You cannot be removed from the mailing list without losing all access to ARC systems.

Warning

Requesting deactivation will remove your VT username from all ARC allocations and groups. Subsequently, all data in your ARC personal user spaces (/home/, /work, etc.) will be permanently deleted with no mechanisms for recovery.

The purpose of deactivating accounts is to reduce the overhead of carrying around thousands of inactive accounts. In the interest of convenience for VT researchers, ARC has not enforced this much in the past, but we’re getting to a point where a significant portion of the data and user accounts we’re managing have been completely abandoned. In bulk, they are expensive to maintain and impede ARC’s ability move forward with new projects, systems, and infrastructure. We’re taking our first steps in the direction of account cleanup and are using this experience to learn what we can reasonably do that works best for everyone.

Former students

The VT PID accounts of former students remain active, but by default have access to fewer things. In particular they no longer have access to VPN or campus wireless network unless someone at VT pays that access. The process of getting access to VPN/wireless is coordinated through the “network liason” of the former department or other sponsoring department at Virginia Tech. Every department should have a network liason who should be aware of this process. There is a small recurring fee for that access.

Managing data for accounts prior to deactivation

If this data is static, it should be reasonable to offload it to a more appropriate long-term storage location. If you need access to it, then I would suggest packaging it into compressed archive files and downloading them somewhere more local to you. If your advisor needs access to them, then we can help coordinate packaging (eg. to tar format), possibly compression, and migration to a suitable location, for instance to the /projects file system in a location accessible to your advisor.