Computing accounts at IU

On this page:

Overview
Basic accounts
Additional accounts
Accounts for groups, departments, and student organizations
Research system accounts (all campuses)
Specialized system accounts
Accounts available for those who are not students, faculty, or staff

Overview

Use of Indiana University technology resources (such as computers, networks, phones) is restricted to purposes related to the university's mission of education, research, and public service. Access to IU computing resources is granted to all admitted IU students and current or retired university faculty and staff, in support of their studies, instruction, duties as employees, official business with the university, and other university-sanctioned activities. Under certain circumstances, guests and affiliates of IU are also eligible.

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.
Email account: Undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff create Microsoft Exchange Online 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.

Additional accounts

Individual home page account (all campuses)

If you'd like to publish an individual home page at IU, you can request an account on Pages, which serves individual websites at pages.iu.edu.

Google at IU (all campuses)

Google at IU gives students, faculty, and staff access to many Google applications, and while similar to free, personal Google accounts, provides additional functionality.

Important:

Shared storage in Google is available only as an option for departments that wish to pay for continued storage in Google.
Due to limits to IU's storage footprint in the Google platform, all individual Google My Drives now have a 5 GB quota.

Microsoft 365 at IU

Microsoft 365 at IU gives students, faculty, and staff access to the Microsoft 365 software suite, Microsoft OneDrive at IU, and Microsoft Teams at IU.

Workstation accounts (IUB only)

The Burrow, a cluster of Linux workstations in Luddy Hall, is reserved for use by students taking Luddy School classes. Accounts are created automatically for students enrolled in classes that use these systems.

Accounts for groups, departments, and student organizations

All group or departmental accounts must have owners who are active faculty or staff members (as reported by HRMS). If the owner leaves the university or (through change of HR status) becomes ineligible to own a group account, the owned account(s) will be removed. To ensure the continuity of group accounts, see Transfer ownership of a group or departmental account.

For details, see About IU computing accounts for groups or departments and Computing accounts for IUB and IUPUI student organizations.

Note:

In accordance with standards for access control mandated by the HIPAA Security Rule, you are not permitted to access data containing protected health information (PHI) using a group (or departmental) account. To ensure accountability and maintain appropriate levels of access control, all users must use an individual login for all work involving PHI.

Research system accounts (all campuses)

UITS Research Technologies develops, delivers, and supports advanced technology solutions that enable new possibilities in research, scholarly endeavors, and creative activity at Indiana University and beyond. These systems are configured to support research computing only, and do not accept inbound mail from the network. Newsreaders, information clients (for example, Lynx), and IRC clients are not supported.

Eligible students, faculty, staff, and sponsored affiliates can request accounts on the research systems:

Eligibility requirements are as follows:

All IU students, faculty, staff, and sponsored affiliated researchers can request accounts on the following research systems:
- Quartz
  Quartz is Indiana University's high-throughput computing cluster. Designed to deliver large amounts of processing capacity over long periods of time, Quartz provides the advanced supercomputing performance needed to run high-end, data-intensive applications that are critical to scientific discovery and innovation.
  
  For more, see About Quartz at IU
- Carbonate
  Carbonate is Indiana University's large-memory computer cluster. Designed to support data-intensive computing, Carbonate is particularly well-suited for running genome assembly software, large-scale phylogenetic software, and other genome analysis applications that require large amounts of computer memory. Carbonate provides a specialized GPU partition for researchers with applications that require GPUs. Additionally, Carbonate offers a colocation service to IU researchers, research labs, departments, and schools.
  
  For more, see About Carbonate at Indiana University.
  
  Note:
  
  UITS Research Technologies will retire Carbonate on December 17, 2023. Carbonate users should plan to move to Quartz or Big Red 200 before the retirement date to ensure that their research continues without interruption. Following the retirement, Carbonate's GPU hardware will be moved to the Quartz cluster, and Research Desktop (RED) will be updated to align more closely with Quartz. The colocation service on Carbonate will not be impacted by this retirement. If you have questions about the retirement of Carbonate, contact UITS Research Technologies.
- Slate
  Slate is a centralized, high performance Lustre file system designed for the persistent storage of scholarly data to meet the needs of data-intensive workflows and analytics running on Indiana University's research supercomputers. Space on Slate is not subject to a purge policy.
  
  For more, see About Slate high performance storage for research computation at IU.
Only IU graduate students, faculty, and staff can request accounts on the following research systems; undergraduate students and sponsored affiliates won't see these systems listed as available options, and will need either faculty or staff sponsors to request accounts (see below):
- Big Red 200
  Big Red 200 is an HPE Cray EX supercomputer designed to support scientific and medical research, and advanced research in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics.
  
  For more, see About Big Red 200 at IU.
- The Research Database Complex (RDC)
  The Indiana University Research Database Complex (RDC) supports research-related MySQL and PostgreSQL databases and data-intensive applications that require databases. The RDC is strictly devoted to supporting research, and is not an instructional, classroom environment.
- The Scholarly Data Archive (SDA)
  The Indiana University Scholarly Data Archive (SDA) provides extensive capacity (approximately 79 PB of tape overall) for storing and accessing research data. The SDA is a distributed storage service co-located at IU data centers in Bloomington and Indianapolis, providing IU researchers with large-scale archival or near-line data storage, arranged in large files, with two copies of data made by default (for disaster recovery).
  
  For more, see About the Scholarly Data Archive (SDA) at Indiana University.
For accounts that require sponsorship, your sponsor must email the appropriate UITS Research Technologies unit to request the account on your behalf; the request should include your IU username and a brief justification of your request:
- Big Red 200: Email the High Performance Systems (HPS) group.
- RDC: Email the RDC Administration team (rdcadmin@iu.edu).
- SDA: Email the Research Storage group (store-admin@iu.edu).

Specialized system accounts

Departmental LAN accounts
To request an account on a departmental LAN, contact the department's network administrator.
University web server (Sitehost) accounts
Sitehost provides web space for online publication by IU departments and officially recognized organizations, including officially recognized student groups. See About Sitehost accounts.

Accounts available for those who are not students, faculty, or staff

If you are affiliated with IU (for example, as a contractor or Manpower employee), you may qualify for an IU Affiliate account.
If you are attending a conference at IU, you may qualify for a Conference account.
Guest accounts provide limited access to certain online applications and services.
IU retirees retain access to some accounts and resources.