Using Single Sign-On Authentication with Multiple Open OnDemand Accounts: A Solution for HPC Hosted Courses

Open OnDemand (OOD) greatly lowers the barrier to entry to high performance computing (HPC) resources and facilitates usage for new and experienced users. Moreover, using OOD for courses with computational components enables lecturers and teaching assistants to focus on the course instead of on-boarding students. To these ends the Yale Center for Research Computing (YCRC) adopted OOD to make its advanced cyberinfrastructure more accessible to researchers and students across the university. While the use of single sign-on authentication in OOD makes HPC clusters easier to access, as implemented this authentication method limits users to a single HPC account per university-provided identity. The YCRC provides separate and temporary course-specific accounts to isolate course usage, which presented a challenge for supporting users with pre-existing research allocations or who are participating in multiple courses. In this paper, we present an easy to implement and maintain solution that separates traffic for each course and maps a single user identity to multiple HPC accounts. This solution can be used for other situations other than courses; wherever one single sign-on identity should access multiple HPC accounts.