ACCRE staff work with research groups to determine the best way for them to contribute to ACCRE and participate in this shared resource. Research groups have two options for being contributing members:
Option 1:
Pay a service fee for use of University purchased hardware that includes hardware and support costs. Service fees may be paid monthly, quarterly or annually but can only be paid for service provided during the current fiscal year period (running from July through June).
Option 2:
Buy hardware to contribute to the cluster by paying for the full cost of the hardware up front and then paying support costs. Support costs may be paid monthly, quarterly or annually but can only be paid for service provided during the current fiscal year period (running from July through June).Your contribution level, or fairshare, establishes your priority for how much of the cluster you can effectively use at any given time. Larger account fairshares generally result in shorter average job wait times in the idle queue and more processing time.
Please contact ACCRE Administration to determine the arrangement which best meets the needs of your research group. You may also begin with a guest account, and in fact, most users begin their affiliation with ACCRE as guest users.
Guest accounts are available for two purposes: to allow users to "try out" the environment and to encourage use by research groups at Vanderbilt that have not previously used the ACCRE cluster. Therefore, guest access is granted for the lessor of 45 processing days (or 1,080 processing hours) or six months duration. When requesting an account, select Option 2 on the Request an Account page.
Guest accounts for staff, post-docs, students, and visiting scholars must be approved and sponsored by a faculty member. Before applying for an account, please verify which faculty member will be willing to sponsor your account. We will contact this faculty member to accept sponsorship of this account and complete the ACCRE Guest Account Disclosure Form. We will also inform the sponsor they will be added to the ACCRE Forum mailing list (as will you when your account is opened) so they will also receive major news pertinent to their research group's use of the ACCRE facility. On campus guest users should also meet with our Education and Outreach Liaison Zhiao Shi before the account can be opened.
After all of the above steps are completed and ACCRE has completed their review of the request, we will notify the requestor of their guest account request has been approved.
These accounts have a small fairshare allocation which is shared by all guest account users, with no guarantees of actual compute time or priority in the job execution queue. The maximal number of processors each guest user can use at the same time is set to 20. (If you need to run a parallel job requring larger than 20 processors, please contact Zhiao Shi). Most users, however, find this a highly effective way to begin using the cluster. Guest usage is reviewed on a quarterly basis.
Anyone with an ACCRE cluster account must notify ACCRE via a helpdesk ticket when there are changes to their contact information. Since helpdesk usage requires an email address, if your email address is changing please send ACCRE your new email address in advance of the old email address being discontinued. Users without a correct email address on file with ACCRE may have their accounts suspended or closed.
Last modified: October 28 2009 08:51:36 CST.
