Number of accounts created: 1000+

On July 12th, the CÉCI project has witnessed the birth of the 1000th account. It has been nearly five years since the very first account was created. The growth has been steady ever since. Approximately 200 new accounts are created each year, for researchers from the five universities, and a bit less than 200 expire each month, meaning the user base is still growing. The last figures indicate though that we are reaching the steady number of 600 active users on the CÉCI clusters. Given the CÉCI clusters now offer 8300 CPU cores, that gives an average of less than 15 cores per user.

Some trends appear clearly: many accounts are created during, or just after, the first training session organised each year in October, and the same phenomenon is observed just after the inauguration of a new cluster.

The distribution of the accounts among the universities emphasizes that observation: UCL was the first university to host a CÉCI cluster, and logically counts the largest number of users in the end. The jump for UNamur is clearly visible in April 2013 when Hercules was setup, and to a lesser extent for ULB in October 2013 when Vega was installed and for ULg when NIC4 was opened in January 2014.

At the time of writing, the oldest accounts still active today were created in April 2011, just after Hmem was made available to all researchers. Interestingly, most account names start with a 'a' or a 's', but none start with a 'u'. The longuest logins have 12 characters (they were created before the 8-char max rule for logins was active), while the shortest have 3 chars. Most logins have 7 or 8 characters.

© CÉCI.