Getting Started: Access

Getting an account

If you belong to one of the groups participating in PLEIADES, you can get an account by filling out this form. If your group was not involved in PLEIADES, you can still get access, but please contact the support team before submitting an account request. In general, you can consult our HPC.NRW Quick Reference Card which outlines the access conditions and procedures. Members of the University typically can get an account without much bureaucracy.

Accounts are valid for a given period (max. 3 years). At the end, you will receive automatic messages about your account life time and can either contact us about an extensions, if necessary. The extension request should contain an exact extension date and involve your group supervisor, such that we know that you are still part of your group.

Questions/Support

In case of questions and problems, please use the following email address:

pleiades{at}uni-wuppertal.de

First Login and password change

You will receive your initial password from the administrators after your group leader has countersigned the user application. Please change your initial password on any PLEIADES login machine by using this command:

$ passwd
Changing password for user USERNAME.
Current Password:
[...]

Interactive JupyterHub

As an alternative to a terminal-based SSH login, we offer a JupyterHub instance that starts an interactive JupyterLab session from your browser. It automatically allocates a small set of resources that are meant for interactive usage.

Note: The JupyterHub is only available from within the university network. If you are outside and need access, use the ZIMs webvpn.

SSH Login

We recommend to create a password protected ssh-key pair to authenticate on login. Additionally you can define in your local ~/.ssh/config:

Host fugg1
    User <USERNAME>
    Hostname fugg1.pleiades.uni-wuppertal.de
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/<KEYNAME>

This way, simply using ssh fugg1 will log in correctly to the cluster. More info about ssh keys is available in the corresponding github documentation.

Note: This approach is also more secure, since mis-typing the URL for uni-wuppertal.de could expose your credentials to a malicious server that is not in our control.

Login Nodes (all users except “whep” users)

There are two login machine from which the cluster can be operated. They are:

fugg1.pleiades.uni-wuppertal.de
fugg2.pleiades.uni-wuppertal.de

These nodes can be used to develop and test code. The node is mostly used to submit Slurm batch jobs to the PLEIADES cluster. This machine runs Alma Linux 9. You can login on it using your username, which will be provided by us. Due to massive attacks from all over the world, SSH access is limited to IPs from inside the university’s network (132.195.0.0/16). In addition, a protection system is used that blocks IP numbers which have been used with several unsuccessful logins. So if you mistype your credentials too often, you will be locked out for a while.

A good practice for using ssh regularly is to setup ssh-keys on your local machine and use

# On your local computer (assuming Linux):
# ----------------------------------------
# if you don't have a key, e.g. ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub, create a new one
# and set a password!
ssh-keygen -t ed25519
# copy the ssh key to fugg1
ssh-copy-id USERNAME@fugg1.pleiades.uni-wuppertal.de
# Login will now use the ssh key
ssh USERNAME@fugg1.pleiades.uni-wuppertal.de

(from your local machine) to enable a key-based login on the frontend.

Login Nodes (whep users)

The login mechanism for whep users is the same as for all other users, except for the login nodes. Since the beginning of 2024, there are also two new machines running Alma Linux 9:

up.pleiades.uni-wuppertal.de
down.pleiades.uni-wuppertal.de

Only whep users can log into up, and down!