Job Allocations

All University of Arizona Principal Investigators (PIs; aka Faculty) that register for access to the UA High Performance Computing (HPC) receive these free allocations on the HPC machines which is shared among all members of their team. Currently all PIs receive:

Best practices

1. Use your standard allocation first! The standard allocation is guaranteed time on the HPC. It refreshes monthly and does not accrue (if a month's allocation isn't used it is lost).
2. Use the windfall queue when your standard allocation is exhausted. Windfall provides unlimited CPU-hours, but jobs in this queue can be stopped and restarted (pre-empted) by standard jobs.
3. If your group consistently needs more time than the free allocations, consider the HPC buy-in program.
4. Last resort for tight deadlines: PIs can request a special project allocation once per year (https://portal.hpc.arizona.edu/portal/; under the Support tab). Requesting a special project will provide qualified hours which are effectively the same as standard hours.
5. For several reasons we do not offer checkpointing.  It may be desirable to have this capability in your code.

How to Find Your Remaining Allocation

To view your remaining allocation, use the command va in a terminal.

You can use this time on either the standard nodes which do not require special attributes in the scheduler script, or on the GPU nodes which do require special attributes.

 SLURM Batch Queues

The batch queues, also known as partitions, on the different systems are the following:

Job Limits

To check group, user, and job limitations on resource usage, use the command job-limits $YOUR_GROUP in the terminal.

Special Allocations

Sometimes you may need an extra allocation for a conference deadline or paper submission.  Or something else.  We can offer a temporary allocation according to the guidelines here: Special Projects