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

If you have applied for resources in the Resource Allocation Competition (RAC), 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 (the PI) and your sponsored users can begin to use the awarded resources at the beginning of the RAC year.

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.

Restricting use of a RAC

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

If you desire, you can limit the use of the allocation to select members of your group / co-PIs. To do so, please follow these instructions:

1) Log in at https://ccdb.computecanada.ca/ If you don't remember your password, you can reset it by clicking the "forgot password" link provided on the login page.

2) You can manage your memberships directly here: https://ccdb.computecanada.ca/resource_allocation_projects/alloc_rap_members/13

or, upon logging in, from the "My Account" drop down menu, select "Manage RAP Memberships". Change the Resource Allocation Project (RAP) to select your current allocation. The RAP associated with NRAC 2014 is your most current RAC allocation.

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.

Projects and accounts

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-yourname.

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-yourname-ab or rpp-yourname-ac.

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

Using a compute allocation on a cluster

When submitting a jobs to the scheduler on a cluster, 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 on a cluster

/project

A /project storage allocation on one of the Compute Canada clusters is allocated 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 RAS (default) project space of the form /project/def-<PI name>. You may wish to move data from that default project space to the RAC /project directory, if the data pertains to the research described in the RAC application.

/nearline

Please see Using nearline storage.

Using a cloud allocation

You should begin by reading some of the information about using Compute Canada's cloud services. You can also consult Compute Canada's terms of use.

Resource Allocation Competition

Compute Canada Role Identifier

Compute Canada Data Base

Resource Allocation Project Identifier

Rapid Access Service