LCRC Users,
LCRC projects have been granted allocations for FY23 Quarter 4 (July-September) on Bebop and Swing.
If your project requested time and was approved for Quarter 4, you can check the project balance by running the following command on any Bebop or Swing nodes:
lcrc-sbank -q balance
Note: All clusters report balances separate from each other.
Dedicated condo nodes should continue to use the ‘condo’ project to submit jobs.
As a reminder, Bebop Broadwell queues allow a MaxTime of 3 days (KNL queues remain at 7 days). Swing GPU queues allow a MaxTime of 1 day. Please modify your job submissions to account for these changes if you have not already.
Users are requested to use their time allocation(s) uniformly over the quarter to prevent large queue imbalances on the machines. The allocation committee meets approximately 10 days before the end of each quarter to decide the time allocations for the next quarter. Large projects (500K and over) that have not used up at least 70% of their time and have not reported their low usage to LCRC at least 30 days before the end of the quarter will have their requested allocation reduced for the next quarter. Depending on the lab-wide allocation time requests, such projects might be granted the same amount of time as their current quarter usage or 50% (or lower) of their requested allocation. Projects with little or no usage (0-10%) of their allotted time in the current quarter can see a more significant reduction in their requested time for the next quarter. Projects with requests between 100 to 500K with low usage (0-10%) at the time of the meeting can also have their requested allocation reduced to 50% (or lower).
PIs and users should review the mid-quarter allocation policy at:
https://www.lcrc.anl.gov/for-users/getting-started/projects-in-lcrc/#mid-quarter-allocs
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The Allocations Committee meets 4 times a year to review allocation requests. Any pending new projects and additional allocation requests are reviewed at each meeting. Ongoing projects must submit an updated project request for each fiscal year. At this meeting, each project receives a new allocation each quarter. Time does not carry over between quarters. Allocations for ongoing projects become active on the first business day of the quarter. All other allocations between quarters become active immediately, upon approval.
On Bebop, a KNL core hour costs 0.585 bank core-hours, while a Broadwell core hour stays at 1.0 bank core-hours.
PIs can request more time for their project at any point during the year via the project management web pages only (https://accounts.lcrc.anl.gov). It is important to show how you computed the request for additional time, e.g., 10 additional runs needed using 30 KNL nodes for 8 hours each, equals 154K node-hours. These requests, like the annual requests, are reviewed by the committee in the context of the overall usage of the cluster. Smaller requests are handled by the LCRC staff. Requests with insufficient information may be reduced.
Please remember to acknowledge LCRC in your publications, e.g., “We gratefully acknowledge use of the Bebop [or Blues or Swing] cluster in the Laboratory Computing Resource Center at Argonne National Laboratory.”
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For more information on projects and using the allocation tools please refer to the LCRC documentation:
https://www.lcrc.anl.gov/for-users/getting-started/projects-in-lcrc/
Thank You,
LCRC Support Team
