Registering an account - Services for Research
Registering an account
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, Mahti, 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. Read more about quotas.
- Edit Puhti and Mahti disk quotas in MyCSC.
- Request permissions to run large jobs in Mahti.
- 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
CSC's computing, cloud and storage services | Requires CSC account | Requires project | Uses billing units | Uses service- specific quota | Terms of Use | Privacy policy |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Puhti supercomputer | yes | yes | yes | yes | [1], [2] | [A] |
Mahti supercomputer | yes | yes | yes | yes | [1], [2] | [A] |
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] |
yes | yes** | no | no | [1], [2] | [A] | |
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 IDA - Research Data Storage service | yes | yes | no | yes | [1], [2], [7] | [C] |
Fairdata Qvain - Research Dataset Description Tool | 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.
Academic use
Academic and educational use for higher education institutions and state research institutes is funded by Ministry of Education and Culture. Research focus should be academic research which results are published as thesis (pro graduate, licentiate and doctoral thesis) or articles in scientific publications.
Commercial use
If university is doing research with commercial enterprises or research institutes which results are not published, they should open a separate project for this type of research which will be invoiced according to commercial usage.