Requesting a Matilda Account

Overview

Matilda accounts may be requested by Principal Investigators (PIs) only, by navigating to OU Forms and selecting the form entitled "Matilda HPC Access Request".

If you are a student or research staff member, you may submit an account request to a PI with an existing Matilda account, and route it to the PI for approval (you should check with the PI first to make sure this is acceptable to them).

Form Completion Instructions

Overview

There are four (4) main sections to the form:

  • Requester Information
  • Cluster & Project Space Information

  • Principal Investigator Information
  • Routing Instructions

The following sections discuss how to complete and submit this form correctly to expedite accurate processing of your request.

Requester Information

Please indicate whether or not you are a Principal Investigator (PI). If you are a student, staff member, or guest, please DO NOT check "Yes". This can cause confusion and delay account creation processing. Please check the radio button with your correct affiliation with Oakland University.

attachment:Matilda-Form-Requester.png

Cluster & Project Space Information

NOTE: If you are NOT a PI, this section will be deactivated/greyed-out.

In the provided text box (shown below) fill-in any special software requests. Matilda has a considerable collection of software already installed which you can view on the Available HPC Software page. This is a good place to call attention to any special software needs, and it provides UTS with a "heads-up" on your requirements.

attachment:Matilda-Form-Software.png

In some rare cases, we may not be able to fulfill certain requests. Examples of potentially problematic software may include (but is not necessarily limited to):

  • licensed software you many own, but which has prohibitive restrictions
  • licensed software which must be purchased, and for which you do not have a budget
  • browser-based applications, and some heavily graphics-oriented applications

Please note that Matilda is primarily a command-line environment, although we can and do accommodate some graphical and browser-based applications (e.g.Jupyter Notebook). We can also often install software for which you have a paid license, but restricting access to members of your project group (unless there are specific license restrictions which prohibit us from doing so). If you have questions about software on Matilda, please reach out to us with any questions.

Under the "Project Group/Space" subsection (shown below), there are several boxes which you should pay special attention to.

attachment:Matilda-Form-Project.png

Please provide a name for your Project/Group. This is generally a relatively short "label" that may contain dashes. For example "smith-lab", "smith-research-group", "graphtheory", etc. This name will be used as the label for your shared project space, and for accounting/tracking of resource usage. Please do not write long descriptions with many characters, special characters (numbers and dashed are fine), or whole sentence descriptions, as we will need to pair this down to something reasonable.

If you have any special data retention, preservation, or compliance requirements, please note those in the box below.

Finally, if you would like to add students, staff or co-PI's to your project group at the time of initial setup, please list their NetIDs or OU email addresses in the designated box.

Principal Investigator Information

If you have checked the "Principal Investigator" button under "Requester Information", this should section will be greyed-out, since the relevant information will be attached to the form automatically.

If you are a student seeking access to an existing PI's Matilda Project account, please enter your PI's email address and the name of the Project/Group (check with your PI for this project name).

attachment:Matilda-Form-PI.png

Once the relevant portions of this first part of the form have been filled out completely, please hit the "Next Page" button.

Requester Information

You will be brought to the requester information page after hitting the "Next Page" button.

For PIs

If you are a PI, this should already be filled in with your email address, and " [email protected] " for "Email Routing". Click "Submit" and this will generate a ticket in our ticketing system, which we will use to fulfill your request.

attachment:Matilda-Form-PI-Submit.png

For Non-PIs

If you are not a PI (for example a student), please make sure to ether your PI's email address in the field "Oakland Email for routing", and then hit the "Submit" button. This will forward your application to the PI for approval. Failure to enter proper routing information here will generate a ticket without the necessary PI approval signature, and we will NOT be able to process your request.

Once the PI receives your forwarded request and approves it, a ticket with the proper approvals will be generated in our ticketing system.

attachment:Matilda-Form-Non-PI.png

Adding Users

Once your Project/Group account is established on Matilda, you may add users any time as a PI by following the instructions above. Just make sure to use your existing Project/Group name, and add the user's NetIDs to the appropriate field.

If you are a student and are seeking access to an established Matilda Project/Group account, please make sure to talk to the PI first, so they are aware you will be submitting a request. Also make sure the PI provides you with the name of the Project/Group they have already setup. Then, forward the request to the PI as described in the previous section.


CategoryHPC