DARWIN account requests

A UD allocation¹⁾ provides access to DARWIN resources for UD faculty or staff acting as the Principal Investigator (PI) and users sponsored by that PI. If you do not have an active allocation, the following forms can be used to request an allocation:

• Startup for first-time users (to become familiar with the DARWIN system); can be transformed into a Research allocation
• Education for work associated with a UD class; the allocation period is strongly-tied to the beginning and end of an academic term
• Research for all other cases

Please allow a minimum of two weeks processing of an allocation request. After being granted a UD allocation, a workgroup is created on the cluster. The PI is the administrative point of contact for that workgroup and is responsible for establishing and enforcing group-use policies for workgroup users.

Modifications to an active allocation prior to expiration, such as

• extending the expiration date to allow more time for completing work
• for a Research allocation:
  • renewal (new CPU/GPU/storage resources in a subsequent time period following expiration)
  • additional resources (credit of CPU/GPU/storage resources to current time period)

should use the Allocation Extension form.

The PI associated with an active allocation should request the addition and removal of workgroup users by submitting a Research Computing High Performance Computing (HPC) Clusters Help Request. Click the green Request Service button and complete the form including DARWIN Account Request in the short description, selecting How to use it? for the type of information you are looking for, and in the description indicate the workgroup name and users to add or remove. There are two types of user that can be added:

• UD community members: provide the UD email address and full name
• HPC guests: provide the full name and email address (preferably a university, institution or organization; not personal)

If you are a UD community member, your username and password are the same as your UDelNet ID and password. You may change your UDelNet ID or password on the My UD Settings page, but it is only synced at 12:15AM EST daily on DARWIN, so basically the next day. In the meantime, you may continue to use the old password on DARWIN until the update occurs.

HPC guest accounts are distinguished by a username having the form hpcguest«uid-number» and an initial password sent in a PDF when the account is created. The «uid-number» is a unique 4-digit numerical identifier associated with the account. HPC guests can change their password: click the login button at the top of the page and enter the hpcguest«uid-number» and current password to login. Upon successful completion of the password page, the new password will take effect immediately on DARWIN. Passwords should always comply with UD's password recommendations.

The workgroups of which a user is a member determine which computing nodes, job queues, and storage resources that user may use. Each workgroup has a unique descriptive group name (gname) chosen by the PI. A user can generate a list of the workgroups of which they are a member using the workgroup command:

$ workgroup -q workgroups
1002 it_css

Subsequently, a list of all members of a workgroup can be generated using the hpc-group-info command:

$ hpc-group-info -a it_css
name = it_css
gid-number = 1002
description = John Huffman
member = traine; Student Training; traine@UDel.Edu
member = trainf; Faculty Training; trainf@UDel.Edu

There are additional user-class groups of which the user may also be a member:

• everyone: this is the default group for all DARWIN users
• ud-user: every UD community member user is a member of this group
• hpc-guests: every HPC guest user is a member of this group
• facstaff: every non-student user is a member of this group
• students: every student user is a member of this group

The user-class groups are used to restrict access to software, for example.

After five years of enabling research and discovery, the University of Delaware decommissioned DARWIN resources from ACCESS on October 1, 2025.