Using a resource allocation

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This is not a complete article: This is a draft, a work in progress that is intended to be published into an article, which may or may not be ready for inclusion in the main wiki. It should not necessarily be considered factual or authoritative.

Introduction

This page is a guide for Principal Investigators (PIs) who have applied to Compute Canada's Resource Allocation Competitions (RAC), a peer-reviewed process to grant priority access to storage and compute resources beyond what can be obtained via the Rapid Access Service.

For RAC 2019, researchers could apply to the following resource allocation competitions: Resources for Research Groups (RRG) Competition and Research Platforms and Portals (RPP) Competition.

You will be notified shortly before the new RAC year of the results of your application. The RAC year typically begins the first week of April, so you should expect notification sometime in March. You and your sponsored users can begin to use the awarded resources at the beginning of the RAC year.

Projects, group names, and allocations

Every PI has a default Resource Allocation Project Identifier, or RAPI. The RAPI typically takes the form abc-123-aa. Your default RAPI also has an associated group name which typically takes the form def-profname.

Each RAC award also has a RAPI, typically of the form abc-123-ab or abc-123-ac, etc., and an associated group name, typically of the form rrg-profname-ab, rpp-profname-ac, crg-profname-ad, or cpp-profname-ae.

A RAC award consists of one or more allocations. Each allocation consists of a resource (such as "graham-cpu", "graham-gpu", "ndc-waterloo") and an amount, and has a designation like abc-123-aa-001.

You can find RAPIs and their corresponding group names and allocations by visiting the Account Details page of the CCDB site. See Running jobs: Accounts and projects for an illustration.

Sponsored users

Compute Canada accounts are per person: Account sharing is strictly forbidden. Each of your students, employees, or collaborators who will use the resources should therefore obtain their own account under your sponsorship. They should go to the Compute Canada database to register in their own name, using your CCRI to indicate your sponsorship when filling out the web form. You (the sponsor) will receive an e-mail with a link to click on to confirm the sponsorship of this individual. There is no limit on the number of sponsored accounts that a PI can have, but such sponsorship should only be in the context of a genuine and sustained research collaboration. More details on the process of obtaining a Compute Canada account are available here.

Information for each resource

For more information, please click on the tab below corresponding to where you have been granted resources. "General-purpose clusters" are Béluga, Cedar, and Graham. More than one tab may apply if, for example, you have been granted an allocation on both Niagara and a general-purpose cluster.

General-purpose clustersNiagaraCloud

Who can use the allocation?

By default, every role that you have sponsored through your Compute Canada Database (CCDB) registration has access to your RAC award. Any co-PIs that were listed on your RAC application will also have access.

If you desire, you can select which users may use your allocation. To do so:

1) Log in at https://ccdb.computecanada.ca/

2) From the "My Account" menu, select "Manage RAP Memberships". This will take you to https://ccdb.computecanada.ca/resource_allocation_projects/members. In the Resource Allocation Project (RAP) drop-down list on this page, select the RAP to which you want to add members.

3) Add or remove project members by clicking the green checkmarks or the red X's. If you do not have permission to edit project members, you may have the wrong RAP selected. The sponsored users of any co-PIs will also be listed and their permissions can be edited. From this page you can add someone else from your group to be the manager, who upon being appointed, will have the permission to edit project members.

Using a compute allocation

When submitting jobs to the scheduler, users will need to specify a group name as the value of the --account option. Jobs pertaining to the research described in the RAC application should be submitted with the group name corresponding to the RAC award, e.g. --account=rrg-somename-ab. Jobs pertaining to other research should be submitted with the default group name, e.g. --account=def-somename.

See Running jobs: Accounts and projects for more details.

Using allocated storage

If you have substantial amounts of data to transfer to a Compute Canada cluster in order to use your storage allocation, we strongly recommend the use of Globus for this transfer.

/project

A /project storage allocation on a general-purpose cluster is created as a directory of the form /project/<group-name>, e.g. /project/rrg-somename-ab, and an associated quota defining the amount of data that can be stored in the directory. Files pertaining to the research described in the RAC application should be stored there by all sponsored users. More guidance on the use of /project space can be found at Project layout and Sharing data.

Note that you will also have default project space of the form /project/def-<PI name>. You may wish to move data from that default project space to the RRG or RPP /project directory, if the data pertains to the research described in the RAC application.

/nearline

Please see Using nearline storage.

Who can use the allocation?

By default, every role that you have sponsored through your Compute Canada Database (CCDB) registration has access to your RAC award. Any co-PIs that were listed on your RAC application will also have access.

If you desire, you can select which users may use your allocation. To do so:

1) Log in at https://ccdb.computecanada.ca/

2) From the "My Account" menu, select "Manage RAP Memberships". This will take you to https://ccdb.computecanada.ca/resource_allocation_projects/members. In the Resource Allocation Project (RAP) drop-down list on this page, select the RAP to which you want to add members.

3) Add or remove project members by clicking the green checkmarks or the red x's. If you do not have permission to edit project members, you may have the wrong RAP selected. The sponsored users of any co-PIs will also be listed and their permissions can be edited. From this page you can add someone else from your group to be the manager, who upon being appointed, will have the permission to edit project members.

Using a compute allocation

When a user submits a job to the scheduler, the job will be assigned to the current allocation of the user's PI. If the user has more than one PI, i.e. more than one group, they must specify a group name as the value of the --account option.

See Running jobs: Accounts and projects for more details.

Using allocated storage

If you have substantial amounts of data to transfer to the cluster in order to use your storage allocation, we strongly recommend the use of Globus for this transfer.

/project

The location of a /project storage allocation on Niagara should be found by using the environment variable $PROJECT. This variable will point to a user-specific directory in the research group's project space.

/nearline

A /nearline allocation on Niagara means space in HPSS. Please see Using nearline storage.

Using a cloud allocation

If you have an active cloud resource allocation you should already have a project and access to the particular cloud on which you have an allocation. For information about logging in and using a particular cloud see using the cloud. If you are unsure about your cloud allocation or if you have difficulty logging into a cloud where you have an allocation, please contact technical support.

Resource Allocation Competition

Resource Allocation Project Identifier

Compute Canada Data Base

Compute Canada Role Identifier