Access

CLIP is the shared computing platform for researchers at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and the Vienna BioCenter. This page explains who can use it, how to request an account, and where to go once your account is active.

Who can use CLIP

CLIP is available to researchers at:

• All institutes of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), not only the founding partners.
• The Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA), and the Gregor Mendel Institute (GMI) at the Vienna BioCenter.

See About for the founding partners. If you are not sure whether your institute is eligible, email contact@clip.science.

Request access

How you request an account depends on whether you already have a Vienna BioCenter (VBC) account:

• You are a member of GMI, IMBA, IMP, or VBCF: request CBE access through the HPC Servicedesk account form.
• You are at another ÖAW institute and have no VBC account: email contact@clip.science to get started. You join as an external research computing user.
• You are still deciding whether CLIP suits your work: email contact@clip.science, or read where CLIP fits.

What to include

Include the following in your request:

• Your institutional affiliation.
• Your research group or lab.
• A short description of your use case, such as the analyses or applications you plan to run.

External users can read the onboarding information for external research computing users.

Start computing

Once your account is active, the documentation takes you from your first connection to production work:

• CBE quick start: connect and run a small test job.
• Access CBE with SSH: set up short-lived SSH certificates on a managed or personal device.
• OpenOnDemand web applications: work in your browser with notebooks, RStudio, and remote desktops.

New to high-performance computing? The VBCF HPC training track covers cluster fundamentals. See Solutions for an overview of the services and Documentation for more guides.

Available hardware

CBE offers general-purpose CPU nodes (C3), GPU nodes with NVIDIA B200 (G5) and A100 (G4) GPUs, and high-memory nodes with 8 TB of memory each (M3), backed by a 1 PB BeeGFS parallel file system. See Data Center for the full breakdown.

Get help

Account holders can open a ticket in the HPC Servicedesk. Prospective users can email contact@clip.science. See Support for all options.