How to get started with services?

This page gives you an overall description on what you need to do to get access to CSC services, and provides you with links to more detailed instructions in CSC Docs and in other service user guides.

Many of CSC's services are free-of-charge for academic research, education and training purposes in Finnish higher education institutions and in state research institutes (subsidized by the Ministry of Education and Culture, Finland). Read more about free-of-charge use cases.

If you're unsure whether or not your use falls within the free-of-charge use cases, please contact service desk: servicedesk@csc.fi. See also information about purchasing services or expert support.

Instructions

For using CSC services, you usually need a project and user accounts for every user. The process of setting them up consists of 5 steps.

Step 1. Create a user account

• Create a CSC account by logging in CSC's customer portal MyCSC with Haka or Virtu.
• If your home organization doesn't provide Haka or Virtu, please see how to contact us to register. This mostly applies to foreign collaborators of Finland-based research groups.
  • You can use some of the services just with your CSC account, see table below.

---

Step 2. Create or join a project

• Create a CSC project in MyCSC to access Puhti, Mahti, Allas, cPouta, ePouta, Rahti, Kaivos and/or IDA. See if you are eligible to act as a project manager.
  • If your work belongs to any of the free-of-charge use cases, select 'Academic' as the project type. If not, please contact servicedesk@csc.fi. After you have a contract with CSC, select 'Commercial' and enter your contract number.
  • As a project manager, you can invite other users as members to your project.
• If you wish to be joined to an existing project, please ask the project manager to invite you with your CSC user account name (see above).

---

Step 3. Add service access for your project

• Add services to your project in MyCSC. Only the project manager can add services.
  • You can add access to Puhti, Allas, cPouta and Rahti yourself.
  • To access ePouta and Kaivos, please contact servicedesk@csc.fi. To access IDA, follow the online IDA application process.
• After you have added services to the project, the other project members are asked to approve the services before getting access to them.
• The service user guides instruct on how to access each service.

---

Step 4. Apply for more resources/billing units, if needed

Many of the aforementioned services consume billing units (see table below). All new academic CSC projects are initially granted 10 000 billing units. IDA and Kaivos do not consume billing units; they have only a quota limitation for each project.

• Use the billing unit calculator to estimate the project's billing unit consumption.
• Submit a billing unit application in MyCSC, when more billing units are needed.
  • Large computing resources are allocated by the CSC Resource Allocation Group. Read more about resource allocations.
• View the billing unit consumption in MyCSC.
  • The use of many services is limited by quotas (see table below).
  • Edit Puhti disk quotas in MyCSC.
  • If you want to adjust other quotas, contact servicedesk@csc.fi.

---

Step 5. Renew your password annually

• Renew your CSC account password annually when requested to keep your projects and their service access active.
• If you wish to end your project, it's access to a service or you want to change the project manager, please contact servicedesk@csc.fi.
• Please check you project's member list periodically and update the members if needed.

---

 

Table about services

	Requires CSC account	Requires project	Uses billing units	Uses service- specific quota	Terms of Use	Privacy policy
CSC's computing, cloud and storage services
Puhti supercomputer	yes	yes	yes	yes	[1], [2]	[A]
Mahti supercomputer (coming spring 2020)	yes	yes	yes	yes	[1], [2]	[A]
Allas Object Storage	yes	yes	yes	yes	[1], [2]	[A]
cPouta Community Cloud	yes	yes	yes	yes	[1], [2], [3]	[A]
ePouta Virtual Private Cloud	yes	yes	yes	yes	[1], [2], [3]	[A]
Rahti Container Cloud	yes	yes	yes	yes	[1], [2], [4]	[A]
Kvasi – Quantum Learning Machine	yes	yes**	no	no	[1], [2]	[A]
Kaivos – relational database service	yes	yes**	no	yes	[1], [2], [5]	[A]
Notebooks – user-friendly web environment for data analytics	not necessary*	no	no	no	[1]	[A]
Chipster – user-friendly software for analyzing genomic high-throughput data	not necessary*	no	no	no	[1]	[A]
Mylly – user-friendly platform for language data analysis	not necessary*	no	no	no	[1], [6]	[A], [B]
Fairdata services for storing, sharing and publishing research data
IDA Research Data Storage service	yes	yes	no	yes	[1], [2], [7]	[C]
Qvain/Qvain Light Metadata Tool, Metax API	yes	no	no	no	[1]	[C]
Management Service for the Digital Preservation Service for Research Data	yes	no	no	no	[1], [8]	[C]

*It is also possible to login by Haka/Virtu account.
** Use of service requires Puhti access.

Default quotas

	Resource	User quota	Project quota
CSC's computing, cloud and storage service
Puhti	Nodes*	100
	Storage in Home*	10 GiB
	Storage in ProjAppl		50 GiB
	Storage in Scratch		1 TiB
	Files in Home*	100 000
	Files in ProjAppl		100 000
	Files in Scratch		1 000 000
Allas	Storage		10 TiB
	Buckets per project*		1 000
	Objects per bucket*		500 000
	Object size*		5 GiB
cPouta	Instances		8
	Cores		8
	Memory		32 GiB
	Floating IPs		2
	Storage		1 TiB
ePouta	Instances		8
	Cores		8
	Memory		32 GiB
	Floating IPs		2
	Storage		1 TiB
Rahti	OpenShift projects	5
	Pods**		20
	Virtual cores per pod**		2
	Virtual cores per container**		2
	Memory per pod**		8 GiB
Kaivos	Storage		On request***
Fairdata services
IDA	Storage		On request****

*This quota is fixed and cannot be adjusted.
**On Rahti, quotas are set for OpenShift projects, which are different from CSC projects.
***Available per project, from 1 GiB to hundreds of GiB.
****Available per project, from 1 GiB to tens of TiB.