Project accounting

Computing hours consumption control process

To guarantee a smooth and fair use of the computing resources available on Irene, projects must use their awarded core hours on a regular basis without being late.

To encourage users to respect this rule, projects consumption is automatically and periodically checked. In case of under-consumption, the number of core hours awarded gets reduced. On the other hand, this mechanism doesn’t prevent over-consumption.

The process respects the following rules:

The 15th of each month, the current accounting of each project is compared with the theoretical one (awarded hours / total number of days in project * elapsed number of days).
Between 30 days and 59 days of lateness, an e-mail warns the project leader.
If a project has more than 60 days of lateness, a 30-days amount of core hours is deducted from the global awarded core hours.

Note

This process concerns PRACE Regular Access projects and over-a-million-hour GENCI projects.
At any time, users can check their project accounting with the “ccc_myproject” command.
No hour will be subtracted without a warning e-mail being sent a month beforehand.
Derogation requests must be sent to the TGCC Hotline.

In case of over-consumption, jobs still can be run. They will run only if there is no job from a nominal-consuming or from an under-consuming project in queue waiting for computing resources. A running job from an over-consuming project is called a “bonus job”. This mechanism is automatically managed by the scheduler and no option is necessary to use it. For DARI projects, the project is closed when the consumed hours reach 125% of the granted hours amount and can therefore consume more than the initially granted hours amount if it has benefited of bonus jobs.

ccc_myproject

It is very important to consume the project awarded hours or your computing share on a regular basis. Therefore, you should check the project consumption. The command ccc_myproject gives information about the accounting of your project(s)

For PRACE and GENCI projects

$ ccc_myproject
Accounting for project XXXXXXX on Machine at 2014-04-13
Login                             Time in hours
login01     ...........................75382.44
login02     ..............................20.02

Total       ...........................75402.46
Allocated   .........................2000000.00

Suggested use at this time...............12.25%
Real use at this time     ................3.75%

Project deadline 201X-0X-0X

You will find:

the consumed compute time in hours for each member of the project
the total consumed compute time of the project
the total amount of hours allocated for this project
the project’s deadline

The suggested use gives the percentage of hours you should ideally have used at this point depending on your total amount of allocated hours and your project deadline. Your real use should be as close as possible to the suggested value.

If you are part of several projects, information will be displayed for each project you are member of.

Accounting information are updated once a day.

For CCRT partners

$ ccc_myproject

Accounting for partner XXXXXXX on partition1 at 2012-11-07
Login       Imputation     Hours (1 month)     Hours (3 months)      Hours (1 year)

login01     *****     ................0.00...............19.10...............19.10
login02     *****     ..............609.33.............1187.34.............1187.34
login03     *****     ..............472.89..............472.89..............472.89
.....

Total used            ............38397.85............59700.49............59700.49
Total suggested used  ...........226271.24...........671514.63..........2671460.39

This information is given in the following periods: 30 days rolling, 3 months rolling, 1 year rolling.

The suggested use gives the amount of hours you should ideally have used at this point depending on your total amount corresponding to your computing share. Your real use should be as close as possible to the suggested value.

Accounting information are updated once a day.

ccc_compuse

The command ccc_compuse indicates how the batch scheduler prioritize of your next job(s) according to your project(s) and its associated partition.

$ ccc_compuse
Account Status
-------------------------------------------------
genxxxx@broadwell regular consumption
genxxxx@skylake under-consumption

It as the following 3 states:

under-consumption: you will get a higher priority
regular consumption: you will get a regular priority
over-consumption: your will get a decrease priority

All your project usage is taken into account but with digressive weighting factors from 1 to 0. For your information a job which ran 14 days ago gets a 0.5 weighting factor.

Moreover the over-consumption is not directly computed from a ratio between the attributed hours and the consumed hours. In fact, it is computed with a comparison between, on one side the percentage of the consumed hours of your project to the whole available hours of the partition, and on the other side the percentage of the attributed hours of your project on the partition. Usually the 2 methods are closely equivalent, but in special cases such as during a Grand Challenge where there are only several projects and more unavailability, their results may differ significantly.