Using a resource allocation

This article is a draft

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

RAC recipients will be notified shortly before the new RAC year (usually first week in April) of the results of their RAC award.

The awards are implemented at the beginning of the RAC year, and recipients can begin to use their awards.

Accounts

Each RAC award has an associated Resource Allocation Project Identifier, or RAPI. The RAPI typically takes the form "abc-123-ab". The award (and the RAPI) will also have an associated "Group Name", which typically takes the form "rrg-yourname-ab" or "rpp-yourname-ac". You can find RAPIs and the corresponding Group Names by visiting the Account Details page of the CCDB site (shown below).

When submitting jobs using Slurm, you and your students and collaborators should use the Group Name as the value of the `--account` option so the resource usage will be attributed to your RAC award and not to your default RAPI. For more on project names and job submission, see Running jobs: Accounts and projects.

Finding the group name for a Resource Allocation Project (RAP)

Sponsored users

Compute Canada accounts are per person: account sharing is strictly forbidden. Each of a PI's students and collaborators should therefore obtain a personal account under the PI's sponsorship. Students and collaborators should go to the Compute Canada database to register for an account in their own name, using the sponsor's CCRI when filling out the web form. The PI 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, however a sponsored account has complete access to the PI's storage and compute allocations so 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.

Using a compute allocation on a cluster

When submitting a jobs to the scheduler on a cluster you will need to specify the account to be "billed" for this job, which is the means by which you and your collaborators can make use of any compute allocation you may have on a particular cluster. See this page for more details.

Using allocated /project storage

A /project storage allocation on one of the Compute Canada clusters is allocated as a directory of the form /project/rrg-<PI name>. This directory is intended to be shared by all the PI's sponsored users. Details on the use of the project space are in the pages Project_layout and Sharing_data.

Note that the PI also has the RAS (default) project space of the form /project/def-<PI name>. The PI may want to copy or move data from that default to the allocated /project directory.

Using a cloud allocation

You should begin by reading some of the information about using Compute Canada's cloud services.

• Links to terms of service and acceptable use should be included.

Resource Allocation Competition

Resource Allocation Project Identifier

Compute Canada Data Base

Compute Canada Role Identifier

Rapid Access Service