Using Great Lakes in a Michigan Engineering Course

The following steps will help Michigan Engineering instructors set up Great Lakes for use in a course. If you are a student in a Michigan Engineering course and your instructor has told you to use Great Lakes but has not set up a course account for you to use, please refer them to this page.

Michigan Engineering instructors should follow these steps to set up an account on Great Lakes for use in their course:

  1. Determine the suitability of Great Lakes for use in your course by considering whether a large computing resource is needed by the students enrolled in the class, the concepts taught in the course benefit from a high-performance computing component, or there is a parallel programming aspect to the course materials. Great Lakes supports long-running, unattended jobs which cannot be run on the computers in the CAEN student computer labs.
  2. Request a Great Lakes course account for your course.
  3. Ask the enrolled students to request a Great Lakes user account and Duo two-factor authentication (for those that don’t already have them).
  4. Determine appropriate limits for the account.  This is to prevent a few students from unintentionally monopolizing the account. Limits can take a number of forms from a simple overall spending limit to more granular individual spending/usage/resource limits for the account or on each student.  You can find information on options on limits in the ARC Great Lakes Policies Guide under ACCOUNT/ASSOCIATION LIMITS.
  5. Inform the students and plan ahead for the end of the course account at the end of the term. Great Lakes logins remain active while they have access to an active Great Lakes account. Students whose only Great Lakes account is a course account should copy their data from Great Lakes to a more permanent location. Their Great Lakes account, including their Great Lakes file storage, will be deleted after the following term if it is no longer associated with a Great Lakes account. The user logins of Michigan Engineering students will remain active since students have access to the Michigan Engineering shared resource account, but they should move their data from the course scratch directory to their student home directory or their shared account scratch directory.

(Optional) Schedule training with the Michigan Engineering research computing consultants if you would like assistance with Great Lakes setup for courses or an introductory session on how to use Great Lakes for the students in the course. The course instructor or GSI is responsible for integrating Great Lakes’ use and course material.

Further Help

To request training with using Great Lakes in a course, contact [email protected].