1.4 Allocation Policies

1.4.1 HPC Cluster Allocation Policy

CHPC HPC clusters are available to qualified faculty and students under faculty supervision. To request access to CHPC computer systems, a CHPC account is required - please submit an online request for a CHPC account.

The general nodes (owned by the CHPC) of the Notchpeak and Granite clusters require an allocation, described below. Users can, however, run in freecycle-mode on these clusters if they do not get or have consumed their allocation. Freecycle runs are subject to preemption by jobs with an allocation. Users can also run without an allocation as a guest on the privately-owned nodes on all CHPC clusters, again subject to preemption. General, CHPC-owned nodes on Kingspeak and Lonepeak do not require an allocation; instead they are run in a "Fair Share" mode to balance usage between groups. There is no preemption on these resources.

Requesting Allocations

All requests must be submitted by faculty with sponsored research projects (or their assigned delegate). The CHPC charges against an allocation by the maximum billable resource (i.e. number of cores, RAM, or number of GPUs) times the number wall clock hour(s).

To understand this calculation, let's give the example of 1 node with 8 GPUs, 64 cores (CPUs), and 128Gb of RAM available:

Node description	Maximum Billable Resource	Allocation Charge
32 cores, 16Gb of RAM for 1 hour	32 cores	32 hours (1.0 * 32 cores)
40 cores, 40Gb of RAM for 1 hour	40 cores	40 hours (1.0 * 40 cores)
2 cores, 128Gb of RAM for 1 hour	64 cores (whole node reserved)	64 hours (1.0 * 64 cores reserved)
4 GPUs, 2 cores, 20Gb of RAM for 1 hour	4 GPUs	4 hours (1.0 * 4 GPUs)

Research groups requiring an allocation must submit a proposal requesting up to 4 quarters at a time. These requests will be due the first day of September, December, March, and June for allocations beginning the following quarter:

Quarter	Quarter Definition	Approximate Request Due Date
Winter	January 1 - March 31	December 1
Spring	April 1 - June 30	March 1
Summer	July 1 - September 30	June 1
Fall	October 1 - December 31	September 1

The request must be made by the principal investigator of the sponsored research project, who must be a faculty member, or their designated delegate.

There are two different types of allocation requests: a Small Allocation Request and a Regular Allocation Request:

Small Allocation Requests include requests up to 30,000 CPU core hours and/or 300 GPU hours. Requests can be made for the current quarter + the upcoming four quarters. These are reviewed by CHPC staff and granted within 24 hours.

Regular Allocation Requests include requests larger than a small allocation request for a maximum of 300,000 CPU core hours and/or 3,000 GPU hours. These are evaluated by the CHPC Allocation Committee on a quarterly basis. The committee will meet during the month prior to an allocation period to consider allocations for the following quarter. Before each meeting, CHPC will provide an estimate of the resources available for allocation in the four upcoming quarters as well as any other technical information the committee may deem appropriate. 

All fields in the allocation request form are needed for the regular allocation request, the small request requires only a Title, Abstract, sources of funding, and Publications resulting from the use of CHPC resources.

Allocations unused in any quarter cannot be carried over to the next.

Users without allocation and those whose usage exceeds their groups allocation will run in the system in "freecycle" mode, running at lowest priority and depending on the individual cluster policies, may be eligible for preemption. See Policy 2.1 General HPC Cluster Policies to see the individual cluster policies.]

1.4.2 Virtual Machine Allocation Policy

The CHPC can provision virtual machines (VM) for sponsored research projects when the application or tools required do not fit within our HPC resources (i.e. computation clusters). Please note that the CHPC charges for VMs. For current VM pricing structure, see this page. To request a VM for these purposes, please send the request via email to helpdesk@chpc.utah.edu.  The request must come from, or be approved by, a PI who has been setup as a CHPC PI. Please provide the following information :

• A project name and brief description of your research. Please include sources of funding, including funding agency, grant/contract numbers.
• Operating System - must be one of the following
  • Currently supported versions of Red Hat Enterprise (currently RHEL 8 and 9)
  • Currently supported versions of Windows Server (currently 2022 unless a different version is required)
  • Other (Please provide a detailed justification why your application cannot use one of the above operating systems)
• Number of blocks; see pricing page. 
• The desired IP name for the host
• The requested security model for this host. Choices are:
  • CHPC Administered
  • Self Administered (NOT an option for virtual machines with personal health information (PHI) data.)
  • Shared Administration (please provide justification for this choice).
• Name of the administrator of this VM
• Detail the security requirements of this host including if there will be any personal health information (PHI) or personal identifiable information (PII) data involved in the project. If so, a Needs Assessment form is required, which includes additional information such as Institutional Review Board (IRB) documents and software descriptions will be required. VMs provisioned for projects using PHI data will be provisioned in the Protected Environment and will require users be HIPAA trained in addition to meeting the standards for running in the CHPC Protected environment.
• The completion of a Faculty Resource User Agreement (FRUA) is required.

For more details, see our 2.5 Virtual Machine Policies

1.4.3 Allocation Committee

Please see the CHPC's governance information for details about the Allocation Committee.