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According to the current migration plan the Atos system will start its operational service on 1 November 2022. Until then Atos HPCF usage will not be charged against SBU allocations. |
To ensure that computing resources are distributed equitably and to discourage irresponsible use users' jobs on the Atos HPCF are charged for the resources they have used against a project account. Each project account is allocated a number of System Billing Units(SBU) at the beginning of each accounting year (1 January to 31 December). You can monitor your usage in the HPC SBU accounting portal.
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Resources used on the ECGATE Class Service (ECS) cluster will not be charged to your HPCF resource allocation. |
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How much is an SBU?
The accounting on the HPCF is currently based on the total elapsed time for which cores are used. With that, the HPCF unit of account, the System Billing Unit, or SBU, for both serial and parallel jobs is defined as follows.the cores allocated to serial or parallel batch jobs. To reflect the current system configuration and performance the formula to compute SBU changed on 1 January 2024 to:
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SBU = P * ( ELAPSED_TIME )* N * T |
where:
| P = 117602602 424074479 / (2000 8090 * 128 * 86400) | is a fixed proportionality factor, adjusted so that one cluster the entire Atos system will deliver 117424,602074,602 units 479 SBU per day on a "typical" |
| N | Is the number of (physical) cores allocated to a job. |
| TELAPSED_TIME | is the elapsed time (real time in seconds) recorded for a job. |
Examples:
- A serial job
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- using 1 hour (3600 seconds) of elapsed time will be charged about 17.06 SBU.
- A parallel job requesting 2 nodes, running for 3 hours elapsed time will be charged 13104.90 SBU.
Compared to 2023 the SBU cost of the same job in 2024 is ~10.8% less .
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At the end of your jobs a short report is appended to the corresponding job output file, which amongst other useful information, includes how many SBUs where used and the account they were charged on:
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SBU simulator
You can see how much your job would cost in terms of SBUs by copying and pasting here your job headers.
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Use the SLURM time directive for the job duration. For example, for a job that needs to run for 12 hours: #SBATCH --time=12:00:00 |
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What are my project accounts?
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If more than one account is listed, then by default, job usage will be debited to the first account listed by default, which is then considered the primary account.
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#SBATCH --account=your_preferred_account |
How do I monitor my
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usage?
To monitor your SBU usage (Cray HPCF until 31 Oct 2022, Atos HPCF from 1 Nov 2022) charged against allocations please visit the HPC SBU accounting portal and login with your relevant computer user-ID.
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SBU usage on the Atos, which is currently not charged against SBU allocations, can be monitored with the Atos Preproduction HPC SBU Accounting portal Until 1 November 2022, the main HPC SBU accounting portal will only shows Cray HPCF usage. |
You may use the Atos Preproduction HPC SBU Accounting portal to keep track of your SBU utilisation on the Atos HPCF. You can login with your usual ECMWF credentials.
You will find the accumulated SBU usage for your different accounts from the beginning of the accounting year as well as the allocations granted for each of them.
Please note the data shown is updated dailythat usage data is only updated once a day and displayed with a delay, so resources used by your latest jobs will not be shown immediately.
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Accounting and account management
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Computing resource allocation rules
Member States are allocated computing resources for their own purposes according to the Council guidelines on distribution of computer resources. Member State Computing Representatives may distribute those resources among projects registered at ECMWF as they feel appropriate. Should a redistribution of resources between the projects of a Member State be required during the course of a year, this may be carried out by the Member State Computing Representative or another designated "privileged user" (see section Administration of project accounts in the Member States below).
Special Projects
Special Projects are experiments or investigations of a scientific or technical nature undertaken by one or more Member States, likely to be of interest to the general scientific or technical community. In the spring of each year, Directors of national meteorological services are invited to submit requests for Special Project resources to be available for use in the following year. Requests are considered by the Council at its winter session, in conjunction with recommendations from the Scientific Advisory Committee and Technical Advisory Committee. Since Special Project accounts are separate from Member State resources, their account administration is performed by ECMWF.
For more details see http://www.ecmwf.int/en/research/special-projects.
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Information is extracted daily from HPCF report files to produce a cumulative total of resources used per user and per account. Use of each account is checked daily and once usage reaches 90% of its resources available, a warning message is sent out, to enable users to arrange for the transfer of additional resources, if necessary. Once usage reaches 100% no further use of that account should be made. The automatic sending of email alerts when a user specified usage threshold is reached, 90% by default, is not yet active.
Registering a new account
New accounts are registered by ECMWF only on the authority either of an ECMWF Department Head (for ECMWF staff accounts) or of a Member State Computing Representative (for Member State accounts) or the Principal Investigator (for Special Projects).
For further information get in touch via our Support Portal.
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Member States may nominate "privileged users" to perform limited administration of Member State accounts using using the HPC SBU accounting portal. By default, the Centre will grant this status to all Member State Computing Representatives with a registered user identifier, but Member State Computing Representatives may propose an alternative person and/or nominate a backup if they wish.
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