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What computing accounts are available at IU?

All students, faculty, and staff at Indiana University are eligible for UITS computing accounts; under certain circumstances, guests and affiliates of IU are also eligible. You can apply for most computing accounts through the Account Management Service (AMS). See:

On this page:


Basic accounts

Students, faculty, and staff at IU initially receive the following accounts:

  • ADS domain account: Your ADS account consists of a unique username and passphrase, and allows you to authenticate to most university resources. See At IU, what is my Active Directory Services (ADS) domain account?

  • Email account: Students create accounts on either Imail (powered by Microsoft) or Umail (powered by Google). Faculty and staff generally have accounts on the Exchange servers, but some also have accounts on Cyrus. See At IU, what is my email address?.

  • UITS printer account for students and faculty (IU Bloomington only): Students and faculty at IU Bloomington also automatically receive a UITS printer account, which is necessary to use most printing facilities on the IUB campus. For more, see About the UITS printing account at IUB.

    Staff do not receive a printer account with their initial UITS accounts. Staff members who want to use printing facilities at IUB will have to create a printer account as detailed below.

Note: For more on account lifecycles, see At IU, when do students get their computing accounts, and how long do they have them?

Research system accounts (all campuses)

IU's research systems are configured to support only research computing. They do not accept inbound mail from the network. Newsreaders, information clients (e.g., Lynx), and IRC clients are not supported on these systems.

All IU students, faculty, staff, and affiliated researchers may request accounts on the following research systems via the AMS:

  • Quarry

    Quarry (quarry.uits.indiana.edu) is Indiana University's primary Linux cluster computing environment for research and research instruction use. It also serves as a "condominium cluster" environment for researchers, research labs, departments, and schools that want to have computational nodes housed within the IU Bloomington Data Center and managed by UITS Research Technologies staff. Additionally, Quarry provides a Virtual Machine hosting environment for the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), the National Science Foundation's largest advanced cyberinfrastructure facility.

    For more, see Quarry at Indiana University.

    Note: Following a system-wide upgrade in December 2012, Quarry now runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 6 (RHEL 6) and uses the Modules package (instead of SoftEnv) for manipulating user environments. For more, see Information about the 2012 upgrade to Quarry at IU. If you encounter any problems or have questions, email the High Performance Systems group.

  • Mason

    Mason (mason.indiana.edu) at Indiana University is a large memory computer cluster configured to support data-intensive, high-performance computing tasks for researchers using genome assembly software (particularly software suitable for assembly of data from next-generation sequencers), large-scale phylogenetic software, or other genome analysis applications that require large amounts of computer memory. At IU, Mason accounts are available to IU faculty, postdoctoral fellows, research staff, and students involved in genome research. IU educators providing instruction on genome analysis software, and developers of such software, are also welcome to use Mason. IU has also made Mason available to genome researchers from the National Science Foundation's Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) project.

    For more, see Mason at Indiana University.

Only IU graduate students, faculty, staff, and affiliated researchers may request accounts on the following research systems via the AMS (undergraduates need faculty sponsorship to get accounts; see below):

  • Big Red

    When commissioned in 2006, Big Red (bigred.teragrid.iu.edu) was one of the most powerful university-owned computers in the US, and one of the 50 fastest supercomputers in the world. Part of a comprehensive strategy to build an advanced cyberinfrastructure to support research at Indiana University, Big Red has a theoretical peak performance of more than 40 teraflops, and has achieved more than 28 teraflops on numerical computations.

    For more, see Big Red at Indiana University.

    Note: Big Red is scheduled to be retired from service in June 2013. Indiana University is replacing it with Big Red II, the fastest university-owned supercomputer in the nation, capable of performing one quadrillion floating-point operations per second (1 petaflop). Based on Cray XE/XK technology, Big Red II has 676 XK nodes (each containing one AMD "Interlagos" processor and one NVIDIA "Kepler" GPU) and 344 XE nodes (each containing two AMD "Abu Dhabi" processors). For more, see Big Red II at Indiana University.

  • The Research Database Complex (RDC)

    The Indiana University Research Database Complex (rdc.uits.iu.edu) supports research-related databases and data-intensive applications that require databases. The RDC supports Oracle and MySQL databases, and provides an environment (rdcweb.uits.iu.edu) for database-driven web applications focusing on research.

    For more, see The Research Database Complex (RDC) at Indiana University.

  • The Research File System (RFS)

    The RFS is a centralized storage area supporting IU researchers. RFS is based on OpenAFS, compatible with all major operating systems, and accessible using various methods from on and off campus. Data are regularly backed up, and reside in physically secure environments on the IUB and IUPUI campuses.

    For more, see The Research File System (RFS) at Indiana University.

  • The Scholarly Data Archive (SDA)

    The SDA is an HPSS distributed storage service with extensive capacity for storing and accessing research data. The system is located at IUB and IUPUI, providing automatic off-site copies of data for disaster recovery.

    For more, see The Scholarly Data Archive (SDA) at Indiana University.

Note: Undergraduate students must have faculty sponsors to get Big Red, RDC, RFS, or SDA accounts. Your sponsor's account request should include your Network ID username and a justification for the request. To request a Big Red or RDC account, have your sponsor email the High Performance Systems group. To request an RFS or SDA account, have your sponsor email the Research Storage group.

Additional accounts

Along with the basic accounts that are automatically created, you may be eligible for other UITS computing accounts, based on your campus and your status within the university. You can request most of these accounts through the AMS.

UITS printer account for staff (IUB only)

IUB staff members do not have printer accounts created with their initial accounts, and instead will have to create a UITS printer account in order to print on campus using UITS-managed printing services. See About the UITS printing account at IUB.

IUB staff should be able to create a printer account through the AMS. If the option to create a printer account does not appear in the AMS, and you still cannot print in the STCs or RTCs, send your account request to UITS Leveraged Services.

Associated with this account is a per-semester printing allotment; see About printing at IUB.

Personal home page account (all campuses)

If you'd like to publish a personal home page at IU, you can request an account on Mercury, which serves pages at mypage.iu.edu. For more, see At IU, what is Mercury? and At IU, what is Mypage, and how can I publish a web page there?

Box (all campuses)

The IU Box service provides a simple, secure way to store and share files and folders online. Box consolidates your content in a single location, easily accessible from anywhere, on any device. You can create files and folders, share them using a direct link, invite others to collaborate, and continue to revise and review your content. Though similar in appearance to other consumer services such as DropBox, Box can directly integrate with existing IU systems (e.g., accounts, CAS for single sign-on with your Network ID) and security.

For more, see About Box at IU and Getting started with Box at IU.

Workstation accounts (IUB only)

The Burrow, a cluster of Linux workstations in Lindley Hall (LH 004 and 035), is reserved for use by students taking computer science or informatics classes. Accounts are created automatically for students enrolled in computer science and informatics classes that use these systems.

Specialized system accounts

  • Departmental LAN accounts

    To request an account on a departmental LAN, contact the department's network administrator.

  • University web server (Webserve) accounts

    Webserve provides web space for online publication by IU departments and officially recognized organizations, including officially recognized student groups. See At IU, who can have an account on Webserve, and how do I get one?

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Last modified on February 19, 2013.

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