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Access procedure for Jean Zay

Our experience is that the access procedure for Jean Zay takes roughly 3 weeks (add 1-2 months on top of that if you are not French for background security checks). It does seem long but it is definitely worth it.

Generic advice

  • Find people that have accessed IDRIS or GENCI clusters around you. If you have no idea who they may be, your local IT may know, ask them. They may save you a lot of time, because they have gone through a similar procedure.

Overview of the procedure

Here we will focus on the easiest procedure to access Jean Zay, namely the "Accès dynamique" one. This procedure only applies if your research is around developing AI algorithms.

  • Create an EDARI account (simple personal details).
  • Fill a form about your project ("Déclaration de dossier"). Hardest part is to figure out who your "Directeur de la structure de recherche" is and to have the form signed by him/her. You also need to write a few lines about your project.
  • Fill a form about to get a computing account ("Déclaration de compte calcul"). Hardest part is to figure out who your "Responsable Sécurité informatique" is and have the form signed by him/her as well as the "Directeur de la structure de recherche". You also need to declare one (or more) IP address(es) that will be able to use to connect to Jean Zay.
  • After roughly a week, you'll get an email from IDRIS giving you your login, password and instructions to connect to Jean Zay.
  • After roughly 2 days, you should be able to connect to Jean Zay.

EDARI account (administrative account)

Estimate of the time needed: 5 minutes

To create an EDARI account: https://www.edari.fr/user/register

In case something goes wrong:

Important details:

  • When filling your phone number, use a real one. Yes, you may get a call to have a better idea what you want to do ...

"Déclaration de dossier" (project description)

Estimate of the time needed: 15 minutes (fill the form) + 1-2 days (figure out the right person to sign the form and get him/her to sign it)

On your EDARI user space, click on the "Intelligence Artificielle" section and then "Déclaration de dossier" and then "Constituer un dossier".

Important details:

  • "Directeur de la structure de recherche" : head of the lab, head of the department, head of the institute, do what is easier for you.
  • As long as you ask for <= 10000 GPU hours (~400 days on a single GPU) and less than 48 GPUs simultaneously (4 GPUs on 12 nodes) it should go through easily (see https://www.edari.fr/voirlappel56).
  • Project description : no need to spend too much time on this, 5 lines should be plenty enough if you ask for less than 10000 GPU hours.
  • Note that in principle once your 10000 GPU hours are exhausted you can ask for a renewal through a similar "lightweight" procedure.

"Déclaration de compte calcul" (computing account creation for Jean Zay)

Estimate of the time needed: 15 minutes (fill the form) + 1-2 days (figure out the right person to sign the form and get him/her to sign it).

Important details:

  • "Responsable sécurité informatique", this is someone that should be able to turn deny you access to Jean Zay, in case there is any issue with your account activity. He/She must be able to certify that you respect the IT charter in your host lab/institution. In CNRS labs, he/she is known as the CSSI (Chargé·e de la Sécurité des Systèmes Informatiques).
  • IP addresses to connect to Jean Zay. Make sure they are static IP addresses (e.g. not your IP address from you home). In most cases: your desktop in your lab will have a static IP address, but best confirm with your local IT people. Note that the form is helping you with some suggestion which were correct when filling it from a fixed desktop in our lab.

IDRIS email with login and password

In principle, you should receive a "Ouverture de votre compte" email from IDRIS roughly one week after having completed the previous step. Contact: [email protected] if you have not received email within a week.

  • Quite a long email with detailed instructions. One the first connection your password is the concatenation of the first password in "Déclaration de compte calcul" and the password in the email. You are then asked to chose a new password.
  • Count 2-3 days after the email to actually be able to access Jean Zay. Some time is needed for the IP address to be added to Jean Zay.

How to write a project proposal (only needed if you request more than 10k GPU hours)

Estimate of the time needed: 1h (write a project) + a few days/weeks for approval (depending on the request).

Useful when you have used most of your computing time and want to fill a "Demande de ressources au fil de l'eau" (request more hours on the fly), and you would like to ask for more than 10k GPU hours.

  • Describe the scientific project for which you need to perform experiments. Be specific about the team you work in, why do you need such computing ressources
  • Estimate the number of hours you will need. To provide an estimate you can estimate your daily/weekly computing time C you need and multiply by the number of months M you want to work on Jean-Zay for this project to get T = C * M.
  • Describe a typical experiment. How much computing ressources do you need: do you use 1 GPU per experiment or 10 GPUs, if 10 why, can be useful to justify your daily need of computation C. Be specific about the algorithms you are using, the data type (image, text, audio, video ...), the model you use (cnn, lstm, kernels, ...) and what your model is used for (predicting image labels, pose estimation, robot movements, ...)
  • Include references to back up your project. If you already have published, it is definitely a plus.

Depending on your request, this proposal can be reviewed by 1 to 10 people.