ARC Account Lifecycle
This article provides some context and orientation regarding ARC account lifecycles.
Accounts require VT-PID
ARC accounts are based on Virginia Tech PID (VT-PID) account and make use of centralized VT authentication. This means that a valid VT-PID is required and logins to ARC systems are authenticated with VT-PID username and password plus DUO second factor.
All current faculty, staff, and students at VT have a VT-PID. In addition, people external to Virginia Tech can get a “sponsored VT-PID” when that is requested by someone at VT. ARC does not manage the creation of new VT-PID.
Creation/Activation
Anyone with an active VT-PID can request access to ARC system. The account creation form will require you to confirm your acceptance of VT usage policies, and then create your account.
This provides the ability to log in to ARC systems and stubs out account components for you. To become fully functional, you will need to have access to a project, its compute allocation account, and optionally additional storage.
Access to the CUI and biomed clusters is restricted and follows a different process. The PI is required to create a ticket via 4help describing the needs (e.g. creating an account for a student, granting access to a project folder, etc). These requests will be reviewed by the Office of Research and Innovation to ensure compliance with the specific project regulations (IRB, data management plan, export controls, etc).
Our Getting started page gives a broader orientation to getting started with research computing at ARC.
Deactivation
User Account Deactivation and Data Retention
It is common for students and faculty to continue working on VT-hosted research projects even after formal departure from Virginia Tech. Users account are considered “active” by doing at least one of the following within the last year:
Run a compute job on ARC resources.
Log into ColdFront to indicate continued activity.
Users which have not done either of the above activities within the last
year are considered inactive. Inactive accounts are deactivated per
security policy. An email will be sent to the user’s email account (typically username@vt.edu) near the end of the first year of
inactivity giving 60 days to respond. The email also reiterates ARC’s
procedure and lists the actions that the user may take:
Renew account activity by logging into ColdFront.
Request immediate removal of the account and home directory.
Do nothing; the account will be deactivated.
ARC will maintain a copy of the data from inactive home directories for a maximum of three years (subject to change based on resource availability and budgets). A user may request that their account and home directory be restored at any time until the end of three years. This is done by submitting a help request via https://arc.vt.edu/help. A reminder email will be sent after two years of inactivity and just before three years of inactivity reiterating that the user can request their account be restored. The copy of the data from the inactive user’s home directory will be deleted after three years of inactivity unless a request to restore is received before three years.
Recommendations:
Do not wait until the last minute to request account restoration as it is a manual process that must be completed before three years of inactivity has passed.
It is strongly recommended that users leaving the university clean up and backup their data somewhere outside the university before leaving.
Project Storage Retention and PI Affiliation
Project storage is associated with a Principal Investigator (PI) and will remain active as long as the PI maintains an affiliation with Virginia Tech. When a PI is no longer affiliated with the university (e.g., due to departure or retirement), the associated project storage must be transferred to another PI, vacated, or archived. ARC staff will contact the PI or department chair to determine the appropriate course of action. A one-year period will be provided to complete the transfer or cleanup, after which the storage will be archived or removed. Archived project data will be retained for a minimum of 5 years subject to availability of resources.
Request deactivation
If you wish to deactive your account, you can do so via submitting a ticket via 4help.
Note
All users who have an active ARC account are required to be on the ARC-users email list. You cannot be removed from the mailing list without losing all access to ARC systems.
Warning
Requesting deactivation will remove your VT username from all ARC allocations and groups. Subsequently, all data in your ARC personal user space (/home/) will be permanently deleted with no mechanisms for recovery.
The purpose of deactivating accounts is to reduce the overhead of carrying around thousands of inactive accounts. They are expensive to maintain and impede ARC’s ability move forward with new projects, systems, and infrastructure. We’re taking steps in the direction of account cleanup and are using this experience to learn what we can reasonably do that works best for everyone.
Former students
The VT PID accounts of former students remain active, but by default have access to fewer things. In particular they no longer have access to VPN or campus wireless network unless someone at VT pays that access. The process of getting access to VPN/wireless is coordinated through the “network liason” of the former department or other sponsoring department at Virginia Tech. Every department should have a network liason who should be aware of this process. There is a small recurring fee for that access.
Managing data for accounts prior to deactivation
If this data is static, it should be reasonable to offload it to a more appropriate long-term storage location. If you need access to it, then we would suggest packaging it into compressed archive files and downloading them somewhere local to you. If your advisor needs access to them, then we can help coordinate packaging (eg. to tar format), possibly compression, and migration to a suitable location, for instance to the /projects file system in a location accessible to your advisor.