Requesting A New Account
The CRC provides free user accounts to all Faculty and PI's at the University of Pittsburgh.
Students, post-docs, and laboratory staff can also have user accounts but must be sponsored under a project PI.
Default Account Resources
Every CRC account is provided with free resources to support user onboarding, preliminary research, and day-to-day cluster activities. This default allocation includes:
- A user account group with unlimited sponsored accounts tied to the primary account holder (e.g., for students, lab staff, and post-docs).
- Home directories for each group member with 75 GB storage per user (storage limits are enforced per user home directory and can not be shared across users).
- 5 TB additional storage on a network-attached file system for larger project data.
- Regular data backups and access to data recovery procedures according to the current CRC data retention policy.
- 25,000 service units for running SLURM compute jobs on any of the CRC's primary clusters.
The default allocation can be renewed annually upon submitting a short proposal. This process typically includes providing a list of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for any recent publications or a brief description of work done using CRC resources.
The CRC allows users to purchase additional storage and service units for research teams requiring resources beyond the default free tier.
Requesting a Faculty / PI account
Pitt Faculty and PIs can request their faculty user accounts here.
New users will receive an email confirmation once their account is created.
The default resource allocation (described above) is available immediately for all new users.
Requesting a Sponsored Account
CRC accounts for Pitt students, post-docs, or lab staff must be sponsored by a faculty advisor or PI.
Please have your PI create a faculty account with the form above if they haven't already, and then they can submit a help ticket requesting your new user account ("Add a user to my allocation").
Sponsored account requests may be submitted by the PI or any user they have assigned as a delegate.
Accounts for University Classes
The CRC provides Pitt instructors with dedicated accounts to support teaching activities. This includes accounts for the instructor and for students participating in the class. Courses are automatically allocated 25,000 service units (the same as the default allocation described above) and 1TB of shared group storage.
To request CRC resources for a new course, submit the Course Allocation Request form and attach a spreadsheet containing each student's full name and Pitt ID. Course accounts are only valid for one semester and may be deleted after the course finishes. If you anticipate requiring CRC resources longer than the standard course offering, please specify your reasoning in the allocation request form.