About VACC allocations
VACC allocation¶
Faculty at UVM can request an 'allocation' on the VACC cluster. An allocation consists of three parts: disk usage, sponsored users, and computing hours. The number of computing hours and the amount of disk usage (space and number of files) vary depending on the 'tier' you are in. See below for more information about the tier system.
Your sponsored users¶
PIs are also expected to maintain their list of sponsored users and to remove users who are no longer actively working for them. PIs manage their sponsored users from the Dashboard for Account Owners. In addition to keeping the list of sponsored users up to date, PIs should also be aware of how data associated with their sponsored users is organized to insure that there is no inadvertent data loss.
In addition to users for whom you are the sponsor, you can also have 'supplemental collaborators', who are VACC users sponsored by another PI to whom you wish to grant access to your GPFS files and to your Slurm account to run jobs as if they were sponsored by you. We do not yet have a form for that, so please send e-mail to vacchelp@uvm.edu and ask us to add the person as a supplemental collaborator. It will help to include the person's first and last names and their NetID.
Your disk usage and data storage¶
PIs are expected to supervise the organization of data in their allocation. That includes the data of their sponsored users as well as their own data.
PIs are also expected to understand and comply with any restrictions on access to data that may come with data use agreements (DUAs). If you need any assistance with evaluating restrictions and implementing them on the VACC, please send us a request via e-mail at vacchelp@uvm.edu.
Most people are used to working from their home directories on personal computers. The cluster is often used for collborative work and for work that involves data that is shared or should be preserved even when the person doing the work leaves. For this reason, the VACC provides directories for shared data.
The home directory of a sponsored user is removed when the sponsorship of that user is cancelled. For that reason we strongly discourage use of home directories for data that should be shared or preserved.
Please see the pages on Cluster data storage (called, collectively, GPFS) on which the VACC allocates space and Research Storage (Netfiles) on which PIs can request 10 TB of lower-cost storage.
Your computing time¶
Many PIs will find that there are more than adequate compute hours in the free tier. Please see the Compute hours page for information about tracking compute usage.
The tier system¶
The tier system is fully explained on the Cost and Payment web page. The summary is that the first tier is free to all UVM faculty and provides a baseline allocation of both compute hours and disk usage (space and number of files). This should be sufficient for many PIs. Circumstances when you might wish to consider one of the paid tiers are:
- You will have large amounts of data; for example, large genetics data sets.
- You will need a large amount of compute time; for example, running many hours of GPU usage, which is charged at a significantly higher rate than CPU usage.
- You will have many sponsored users who will have, in aggregate, large amounts of data and/or large numbers of files.
It is important to understand that limits on your allocation are aggregated over all your sponsored users as well as yourself.