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

User accounts will be deactivated after a period of 2 years of inactivity (i.e., no login activity). ARC staff will notify the user via email and allow a 7-day window to respond before deactivating the account. Upon deactivation, the user will be removed from all compute and storage allocations, and their home directory will be archived. Archived user data will be retained for a minimum of 5 years.

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 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. Archived project data will be retained for a minimum of 5 years.

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.