Institution Specfic Access

Condominium Access

Condominium access is now an important part of the HPC service ICHEC provides to the research community. A condominium share is a fractional allocation of the computing resources of the Stokes system. A number of instituions who have partnered with ICHEC particulary during the August 2010 upgrade of the the Stokes system to avail of this approach to providing instutitonal access. The condos permit institutions themselves to grant resources directly to their researchers. The condos available are outlined in the table below.

While ICHEC operates the condo systems and provides helpdesk and software provison support to condo users just as with the normal national service it does not grant access to the condos. Each institution involved has a local point of contact with whom prospective condo users should communicate. Once requested to do so by these points of contact ICHEC will enable access for the end user.

Condominium users are also entitled to hold national service project resources. Mixing usage between both mechanisms is very straightforward. Jobs are submitted to the system via PBS scripts in the normal way. A condo or project can provide the hours simply be changing the account following the -A directive to a project code or the condo code as listed in the above table e.g. using the University of Limerick Condo #PBS -A ul01

Each month resources commensurate with those outlined in the above table are allocated to the respective condos. Currently all instituions have chosen to have their respective condos operated using this monthly allocation model. This means that users are not limited to the number of cores shown in the above table, but rather to equivalent the number of core hours per month. This greatly enhances the flexibility of the system to accomdate varying levels of usage. The option of a partition based model is also available to institutions whereby their resources are statically allocated and set aside for their condo users. While this approach ulitmately delivers the same potential amount of compute power it means that the users are restricted to running jobs that are not bigger than their condo and unused compute time cannot be recouped later in the month.

NUI Galway Stoney Users

Further to the Stokes access discussed above NUI Galway users who wish to gain alternate access to Stoney should contact ICHEC at info@ichec.ie and we will direct your request to the appropriate person within NUI Galway.