General FAQ¶

CARC resources are free of charge for UNM faculty, staff, and student researchers, supported by the Office of the Vice President for Research. External collaborators can get accounts through a UNM project PI — see Getting started.

UNM affiliates use the self-service portal at mokey.alliance.unm.edu; collaborators without a UNM email are requested by their PI. Details in Getting started.

Your account must belong to a CARC project that holds compute resources. Ask your PI to add you to their project in ColdFront. Note that your Slurm account is not the same as your login account — see Slurm accounting and fairshare.

PI eligibility follows the UNM criteria for Principal Investigator status. Eligible PIs create projects and request resources in ColdFront.

The core service is free for UNM researchers. Additional dedicated storage and premium services are available for purchase — see premium research computing services.

Through Slurm's fairshare system: heavy recent usage lowers your scheduling priority relative to lighter users, so everyone gets a fair opportunity. See resource limits and Slurm accounting.

Yes — ColdFront allocations have end dates, and ColdFront emails automated [coldfront] notices as they approach: renewal reminders and expiration warnings need action from the PI (or a project manager), while request confirmations ("allocation request submitted", "quota increase request submitted") are informational. Renewals, like new requests, are handled in ColdFront — renew before the end date so the resources an allocation grants don't lapse. The Annual Project Review walkthrough video covers the yearly review; unsure what a notice means? Open a ticket.

National platforms are the next step — ACCESS-CI allocations, the Jetstream2 cloud, and CyVerse data services. See partner cyberinfrastructure; CARC staff can help you apply.

Home for small, important files; project space for shared work; scratch for active job I/O. Quotas and the quotas command are covered in resource limits, and the layout in storage and backups.

Easley-local project scratch follows /easley/scratch/projects/<pi-username>/<pi-username><project-id>. Center-wide project scratch usually follows /carc/scratch/projects/<pi-username>/<pi-username><project-id>, but is not consistently nested — some allocations sit directly under projects/. If a newly approved allocation's path doesn't exist yet, check its status in ColdFront (it may still be provisioning), and open a ticket to get the exact path. See storage and backups.

Scratch is sized for active job I/O, not retention — files on Easley-local scratch are auto-deleted after 180 days without access. For data that must persist, ask your PI (or a project manager the PI has designated) to request project storage in ColdFront, choosing between the backed-up flavor (protected against loss) and non-backed-up project scratch (larger, unprotected). Estimate your current and projected size first — it's the first thing support will ask. Urgent need that can't wait for approval? Open a ticket.

Enterprise (NetApp) storage has automated snapshots (hourly to monthly, retained up to four months). Scratch is not backed up. See storage and backups.

No. HIPAA, PHI, PCI, FERPA, and CUI data may not be stored on or transferred via CARC systems — see the Good Neighbor Use Policy.

First check module avail (environment modules). You can install your own stacks with conda or run containers. For system-wide installs, open a ticket. Export-controlled software requires prior written approval from UNM Export Control.

Easley has NVIDIA L40S and H100 GPUs, and Hopper has A100s (and some V100s) — see the systems overview. Request GPU partitions in your job script; examples are in example Slurm scripts.

Note that Easley's h100 and l40s partitions are group-gated: access comes from an approved ColdFront allocation for the specific partition, requested by your PI. If a submission is rejected with uid not in group permitted to use this partition, see troubleshooting.

Yes — Open OnDemand for files, shells, and jobs, or JupyterHub for notebooks.

Use the statement on acknowledging CARC and add the publication to your project's list in ColdFront.