About Cluster Account Groups, Affliations

All users on our compute clusters have both a username and one or more groups. The username matches the Onyen ID, while groups – known to the Slurm job scheduler software as accounts – are most often named after the user’s UNC faculty adviser, PI, lab leader or other sponsor. Users can check on their current Slurm users and group affiliations with the sacctmgr Slurm command:

sacctmgr list associations format=user,Account%20 user=yourOnyen
      User              Account
---------- --------------------
      yourOnyen          rc_profName1_pi

Users who want to be affiliated with multiple groups can send a request to research (at) unc.edu, cc’ing the group’s sponsor. Users with multiple group memberships should request which group they prefer to be the default.

In cases where there is membership in more than one group,you can check the default:

sacctmgr list associations format=Account%20 user=yourOnyen
      User              Account
---------- --------------------
      yourOnyen          rc_profName1_pi
      yourOnyen          rc_profName2_pi

sacctmgr show user yourOnyen format=defaultAccount%20
            Def Acct
--------------------
         rc_rc_profName1_pi

Without overriding the default account, all jobs submitted will be affiliated with rc_rc_profName1_pi. To submit jobs with one of the non-default groups, use the -A option in your script or sbatch command string, e.g., -A rc_profName2_pi

Note: A faculty sponsor or other affiliation is not required, but when requesting an account it is best to provide one. Generally, being in a faculty-affiliated group may result in your work having fewer job scheduling delays.

For students doing coursework, please note the class number where indicated in the account request form.

Note: In the Slurm job scheduler’s terminology, the combination of a user’s name, group and other properties are known as an association (see https://slurm.schedmd.com/sacctmgr.html for details).