1. Requesting your CÉCI account

If all eligibility conditions are met, you can initiate the creation of your CÉCI account using the following portal: Connection portal

Your request will then be reviewed by the CÉCI administrators. Account activation is not immediate and may take some time.

2. Preparing while waiting for approval

While your account request is being processed, we strongly recommend that you familiarize yourself with the basic concepts and tools required to work on the clusters.

Start with the official quick start guide: Connecting to the CÉCI Clusters

This documentation explains:

  • How to connect to the clusters via SSH
  • Which login nodes to use
  • How to properly configure your ~/.ssh/config file

Taking the time to configure your SSH access in advance will save you valuable time once your account is activated.

3. Transferring your data and jobs

Once your account is approved and you have access to the clusters, the next step is to upload your data, scripts, and job files.

Please follow the official guide: Copying Files to the CÉCI Clusters

This section covers common file transfer methods such as scp, rsync, and sftp.

4. Running your first job

After your files are in place, you are ready to submit your first job to the scheduler.

CÉCI clusters use Slurm as workload manager. To understand how a cluster is structured and how jobs are submitted: Slurm Tutorial – Anatomy of a Cluster

This documentation explains:

  • The architecture of a compute cluster
  • The role of login nodes and compute nodes
  • The structure of a Slurm job script
  • How to submit, monitor, and manage jobs

Once you are comfortable with these concepts, you will be able to efficiently run computations on the CÉCI infrastructure.

5. Next steps

After completing these steps, you should be able to:

  • Access the CÉCI clusters securely
  • Transfer your data
  • Submit and manage jobs using Slurm

We recommend regularly consulting the CÉCI support documentation for more advanced usage and best practices.