Daily Bulletin

Changes coming to CISL’s resource allocation accounting

January 30, 2023

CISL will begin accounting for the use of GPU resources on the Casper cluster and is also revising the charging algorithm for jobs on shared CPU nodes on both Casper and Cheyenne beginning Monday, February 13.

Projects that have used Casper GPU resources in the past year have all now received an initial GPU-hours allocation based on that previous use. Charges will be based on a job’s walltime. To check the status of those allocations, go to the Systems Accounting Manager My Projects page (login required). Submit any requests for additions through the NCAR Research Computing help desk.

The revised shared node charging algorithm is based on elapsed walltime rather than Unix CPU time, to be consistent with GPU-hour accounting and with the planned accounting for Derecho use when that system becomes available.

The shared-node algorithm change will have no major effect on allocation use for many workflows, but will increase charges for jobs that leave compute cores idle and unavailable to other users. To avoid unnecessary charges and to release idle resources that others could be using, free up those resources (for example, by terminating JupyterHub batch servers and closing Dask clusters).