The Fulton HPC systems have a great deal of capacity, but CPU and Storage resources *are* limited.  Nearly 300 users share the systems now.  So there must be policies to allocate resources.  The basic unit of CPU resources is the CPU-Hour (normalized to a nominal 2.5Ghz CPU with 1GB of memory).

There are three tiers of allocations for CPU time:

• Base or General Allocations
• Committee Allocations
• Purchased allocations

Base Allocations are given to all ASU researchers who apply.  For the 2007 fiscal year, the base allocation is 10,000 CPU-hours for Fulton School researchers (and other participating units) and 5,000 CPU-hours for all other ASU researchers.  Allocations are tracked by principal investigator (i.e., a faculty members usage includes all of their graduate students and postdocs).   A base allocation includes 10GB of home directory storage space.

Committee Allocations are granted through a proposal process to a faculty committee.  Directions for the proposal process, click here.  In FY08, the committee will allocate approximately 2 million CPU-hours.  Requests can be for up to 200,000 additional hours beyond the base allocation.   The committee judges allocation requests based on the research merit, the sponsored research supported, the potential for new research to be developed, and results from past allocations.

Purchased Allocations are additional CPU time a faculty member acquires through grants or charges. Purchases can take the form of direct charges for cycles or through contributions of hardware (there is flexibility in the type of charge to support most agency grant programs).  HPCI staff are happy to work with faculty to incorporate the most appropriate mechanism in research proposals.   The rate for direct cycle charge for FY05 is $0.05 per CPU-hour.   

Storage is also available on a leased basis.   Archive storage is available for a one-time charge of $3,000 per Terabyte for a 5 year period.   High speed scratch storage or additional home directory space is also available.

Access to larger memory: Some jobs require larger amounts of memory than 1GB per processor.   Larger memory amounts are available, but are deducted at a higher rate against the user’s allocations.  Jobs requesting 2GB of memory per processor are charged at a 50% premium (1.5 CPU hours charged per actual hour used).  A limited subset of nodes can support even larger memory… when these nodes are available, jobs may request up to 8GB/CPU at an additional 10% premium per GB above 2 (e.g., 4GB  per CPU is charged at 1.7x the normal rater, 6GB per CPU at 1.9x).

Increasing Allocations:  Allocations will be increased for jobs that allow additional flexibility. Starting January 1st, 2007, a Condor service will be available from the HPCI.  Jobs submitted to the Condor pool must be compiled against the Condor libraries, and may be preempted or moved to other clusters.   Users will receive a 50% allocation bonus for submitting to this queue.