Logging on to BriCS Systems and Services

If you're using BriCS services for the first time, please follow the more comprehensive instructions in the Getting Started Guide.

If you are having issues with accessing BriCS services please first consult the Known Issues section before getting in touch with the BriCS team.

Connecting to the BriCS Portal and Helpdesk Services

When connecting to the BriCS portal and the BriCS helpdesk, you will be taken to a page where you can choose which identity provider you want to use to log in.

There are three choices of identity provider:

• University Login (MyAccessID)
• Other Login (IdP of last resort)
• BriCS (Administrators Only)

You need to choose an option that matches the email address at which you received your invitation.

Choose the "University Login" option if your invitation was received by your University account. This will let you use your own University account to log in.

Choose the "Other Login" option if you don't have a University account, or if you received your invitation at a different email address. This option should only be used if your institution does not support MyAccessID.

The "BriCS" option is only for administrators, and should not be used.

Connecting to BriCS supercomputers with Clifton and SSH

To connect using SSH you will need to use signed SSH certificates. We provide a command line tool called Clifton for obtaining SSH certificates and configuring your SSH client to use these. The certificates are valid for 12 hours.

You can download the latest release of Clifton for your platform from here.

Make Clifton executable

On Linux and macOS, you will have to use chmod u+x clifton to make clifton executable.

To use Clifton to obtain an SSH certificate:

./clifton auth

Specify an SSH key for Clifton to use

By default Clifton will look for existing SSH keys in standard locations (e.g. ~/.ssh/id_ed25519). If your SSH key is in a non-standard location, you can tell Clifton which key to use to create the certificate by using the --identity option, e.g.

./clifton auth --identity /path/to/ssh_key

After Clifton has generated a certificate, you will be able to connect to the required BriCS facility using your project-specific account using clifton-generated SSH host configuration and aliases.

Write an SSH config file to use clifton-generated SSH host aliases

In order to use preconfigured host aliases of the form <PROJECT>.<FACILITY>.isambard to connect via SSH, you first need to run

./clifton ssh-config write

This will cause clifton to write an SSH config file ~/.ssh/config_clifton on your computer and link to it from your main SSH config file.

You should re-run clifton ssh-config write whenever you join/leave a BriCS project to ensure your local SSH configuration is up to date.

To connect SSH using a project-specific account, use

ssh <PROJECT>.<FACILITY>.isambard

where <PROJECT> is substituted for the short name of your project and <FACILITY> is substituted for the authorised system, currently aip1 or 3 for Isambard-AI and Isambard 3 respectively.

SSH configuration generated by clifton can also be used in other contexts, e.g. using scp or rsync to transfer data from your computer

scp <SRC_PATH> <PROJECT>.<FACILITY>.isambard:<DEST_PATH>

where <SRC_PATH> should be replaced with the path to the file(s) to transfer on your computer and <DEST_PATH> should be replaced with a destination path on remote system.

Finding the short project name

A list of project short names you are able to connect to is output by the clifton auth command after authenticating.

To find out the names of projects you are able to access at a later time, run

clifton ssh-config

which will display configuration for each of the per-project SSH host names you are able to connect to, each starting with a project name, i.e. <PROJECT>.<FACILITY>.isambard.

SSH Certificates are only valid for 12 Hours

Your signed SSH certificates are only valid for 12 hours. After 12 hours, you will need to rerun ./clifton auth