To check the CPU hour allocation allotted to you, run mybalance -h. To see the allocation in seconds, run mybalance. The allocation will be listed by project.

CPU Hours are the number of CPUs for the job times the amount of time the job takes to run. All times are rounded to the nearest second. For example, if you have a job that takes 3 hours to run on 64 processors, you will have used 3*62=192 hours.

When you submit a job you must specify the amount of walltime you expect the job to take. The system will then check to see if you have enough hours, then reserve that number of hours, from our example 192 hour. When the run is completed, the actual amount of time used will be deducted and the reserve will be released. It is a good idea to leave a little extra time in your estimate. Note the word little, because any time that is reserved cannot be used on another job. For example, If you have 100 hours in your account and two jobs that have 100 CPU Hours estimated (number of processors * walltime), only the first job submitted will run, even if each job only uses 1 hour.

Jobs can run slightly over their walltime estimates before being killed.

Your account gives you access to a limited amount of persistent disk space in /home/yourusername (your home space) that can be accessed from all the nodes. This space should be used for your jobs and data. The amount of disk space you are allotted is called your quota.

The quota command tells you how much disk space you are using in the blocks column and how much you have left in the quota column. When you run out of space you will no longer be allowed to write to the disk and will need to remove some files before you can write again. Running out of quota can kill your jobs, so keep an eye on it.

In deference to not killing jobs, we allow you exceed your quota slightly for a short period of time. When that short period of time is over, writes will not be allowed until you are under your quota again.