Content

Project account

NHR center , NHR@ZIB follows NHR-wide regulations.

• A user User Account accesses an a project account containing units of core hour to measure compute time.The NHR centers charge for batch jobs on the compute systems. The charge for a job is a number of units core hour. A project account can be a Test Project or a Compute Project.
• A batch job on the compute system is charged by a number of core hour to measure the usage.
• Usage of persistent storage including the tape library are currently not accounted.

Charge

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The NHR centers operate different types of compute nodes (Lise and Emmy) organized in partitions, see Compute Partitions. The charge rates for the partitions are given in the table.

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standard96

standard96:test

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large96

large96:test

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rates

NHR@ZIB operates system Lise with different Compute partitions. Properties for available (slurm-)partitions you find on the pages

• Slurm partition CPU CLX,
• Slurm partition GPU A100, and
• GPU PVC partition.

Each partition holds a specific charge rate.

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1: Practically the charge is a very small number (close to zero).

Job charge

The charge of core hours for a batch job depends on the NHR systems is the number of core hours and is calculated from the number of nodes reserved for the job, the wallclock time used by the job, and the charge rate for the job nodespartition used. For a batch job with

• num a number of nodes n,

• running with a wallclock time of t hours, and

• on a partition with a charge rate charge_p

the job charge charge_j yields

charge_j = numn * t * charge_p

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Account Types

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• personal accounts and
• project accounts

Personal Account

On the NHR systems, each user account is attached to a bank account containing core hours. Both accounts, the user account and the bank account, share the same name but their purpose is different. The user account is the account of the Linux operation system and is used for authorization and access control incl. permissions to data files. The bank account is to limit the computing time.

At the beginning of each quarter, the bank account is granted by 75.000 core hours during the lifetime of the user account. In reasonable and exceptional cases, the grant of the bank account can be extended to 300 k core hours per quarter. For that, please contact your consultant. At the end of each quarter all remaining core hours in the bank account are dropped.

Project Account

A compute project holds a bank account for the project. This project account contains a compute capacity in core hours. At the beginning of each quarter the account is granted by the number of core hours following the funding decision for the given compute project. A project account holds at least 4x300 k core hours per year. Unused core hours are transferred to the subsequent quarter, but only one time.

In case of problems with your compute capacity in core hours in your project account please contact your consultant. This might affect the

• application for additional core hours,
• movement of core hours between quarters.

Select the Account in Your Batch Job

Batch jobs are submitted by a user account to the compute system. For each job the user chooses the account that will be charged by the job.

• For the user account the default account for compute time is defined on the link Informationen zu Ihrer Kennung/Account information of the service portal. At the beginning of the lifetime of the user account the default account is the personal account.

• The user controls the account for a job using the Slurm option --account at submit time.

To charge the account myaccount
add the following line to the job script. 
#SBATCH --account=myaccount

After job script submission the batch system checks the account for account coverage and authorizes the job for scheduling. Otherwise the job rejected, please notice the error message: