Resource Accounting

 

Overview

This document helps explain the accounting system and provides examples of how to use the accounting software to monitor and manage allocations. It is not intended as a complete reference document for the accounting system.

 

Resource Allocation

ARSC allocates computer resources to projects rather than to individuals. Each project has a designated principal investigator (PI) who is in charge of the research project. The PI approves user access to the project. All users have equal access to the available resources.

ARSC resources are allocated in CPU hours for each platform. Allocations are for the current fiscal year (1 October - 30 September). If your project has or will run out of allocation, please contact User Support about applying for additional allocation of CPU hours.

 

Estimating Your Allocation Request In CPU Hours

To obtain the initial estimates of the CPU hours, most users need to run sample jobs. ARSC provides "Start Up" accounts that have limited allocation for code testing, porting and debugging. "Start Up" accounts are for users needing to make preliminary estimates of their resource requirements.

 

Managing Your Resources

Resource accounting is applicable to pacman (Penguin Compute Cluster).Utilization on ARSC's Linux workstations and other systems is not currently tracked. The show_usage command is available to help you track the utilization for your project(s). The show_usage utility is located in /usr/local/bin on pacman.

 

show_usage

pacman % show_usage -h

show_usage [-h] [-s]   
    -h show this help dialog    
    -s shows project information for all available systems.

Sample Use: 

pacman1 % show_usage 

            ARSC - Subproject Usage Information (in CPU Hours)
                     As of 13:21:01 hours ADT 21 Nov 2011
          For Fiscal Year 2012 (01 October 2011 - 30 September 2012)
                  Percentage of Fiscal Year Remaining: 86.03% 

                          Hours      Hours      Hours      Percent  Background
System     Subproject     Allocated  Used       Remaining  Remaining Hours Used
========== ============== ========== ========== ========== ========= ==========
pacman     projecta        300000.00  165988.93  134011.07    44.67%     428.80
pacman     projectb         10000.00       0.00   10000.00   100.00%       0.00

Project utilization for all allocated systems can be obtained by using show_usage with the -s option as in show_usage -s. 

The PI for a project may request a more comprehensive utilization report by contacting User Support .

 

Instructions for Users in Multiple Projects

Allocations on ARSC systems are controlled via UNIX groups.  The groups command shows the user's group membership.  

For example:

pacman% groups
projecta projectb

The default project for this user is "projecta". Users in more than one project can select an alternate project to charge their allocation against by using #PBS directives. By default, allocation will be charged to the user's primary group.


Users in a single project do not need to specify a project in their job submission scripts.


In the above example, allocation hours would be charged to "projecta" by default, but could be charged to "projectb" by including the following option in their job submission script:

#PBS -W group_list=projectb

 

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