Registration and Login for OSG Connect¶

The major steps to getting started on OSG Connect are:

apply for an OSG Connect account
meet with an OSG Connect staff member for an short consultation and orientation.
join and set your default "project"
upload .ssh keys to the OSG Connect website

Each of these is detailed in the guide below.

Once you've gone through these steps, you should be able to login to the OSG Connect submit node.

Account Creation¶

Start by creating an OSG Connect account. Visit the OSG Connect web site, then click on the Sign Up button. You will need to agree to our Acceptable Use Policy in order to get to the main log in screen.

The main log in screen will prompt you to sign in via your primary institutional affiliation. You'll be directed to a discovery service which asks you what your home institution is. (If you've used CILogon before it may already know your home institution and skip this step.) Locate your institution in the list, or type its name to find matches.

No Institutional Identity?

If you don't have an institutional identity or can't find your institution on the provided list, either (separately) sign up for a Globus ID and follow the link for that option on this page, or contact the OSG Connect support team for guidance at support@osg-htc.org

Note that this is the identity that will get linked to your OSG Connect account, so be sure to pick the institution (if you have multiple affiliations) that you would like to associate with your OSG Connect account.

After selecting your institution in the discovery service, you'll be taken to your own institution's local sign-in screen. You've probably used it before, and if it looks familiar that's because it's exactly the same web site. Sign in using your campus credentials. When done, you'll return automatically to the OSG Connect portal and can carry on with signup.

After continuing, and allowing certain permissions in the next screen, you'll be asked to create a profile and save changes. If this works successfully, you should see that your membership to OSG is "pending" on the right hand side of the screen.

Orientation Meeting¶

Once you've applied to join OSG Connect as described above, an OSG Connect support team member will contact you to arrange an initial orientation meeting. This meeting generally takes about 20-30 minutes and is a chance to talk about your work, how it will fit on the OSG, and some practical next steps for getting started. Some of these next steps are also listed below.

Join a Project¶

As part of the sign up and meeting process, you'll be asked for information related to your research group so that you can be assigned to an accounting project. For more information about this process, see this guide: Start or Join a Project in OSG Connect

Generate and Add an SSH key¶

Once your account is created and you're approved, you can generate and upload an SSH key to the OSG Connect website; this key will be duplicated on the OSG Connect login node so that you're able to log in there and submit jobs.

To see how to generate and add an SSH key, please visit this page: Step by step instructions to generate and adding an SSH key

Log In¶

Once you've gone through the steps above, you should be able to log in to the OSG Connect login node. See the second half of the SSH key guide for details: How to Log Into the OSG Connect Login Node

Overview of access procedure and accounting¶

For those interested in details, this section describes some of the background information behind projects.

The OSG governs access to grid resources through an accounting framework that assigns each user's jobs to an accounting group or project. As a new user of the OSG, one of the first things to iron out is what project or projects best describe your work. This is more a matter of accountability than of entitlement: it concerns how organizations report to their sponsors and funding agencies on the utilization of resources placed under their administration.

To assist in this, OSG Connect uses a group management tool that places users into one or more groups with names such as osg.RDCEP or osg.Extenci. The osg portion of this name differentiates our groups from those of other organizations in the same group management facility. The latter portion identifies the specific project, each with a Principal Investigator or other administrator, that oversees access to resources. Within our web tools, these names are often in mixed case, though you may see them uppercased in some reporting/accounting software.

The first step in registration is to create a user account and bind it to other identity information. After that you will enroll in a project group.

Once you've enrolled in a group, you'll have the requisite rights to log in to the submit node for the OSG Connect job scheduler, or to transfer data in and out of Stash. Submit node logins are typically via Secure Shell (SSH) using a password or a public key. We'll discuss how to connect further on.

Registration and Login for OSG Connect¶