Allocation Year Transition 2024 to 2025

The NERSC 2024 Allocation Year (AY24) ends at 7 a.m. Pacific Time on Wednesday, January 15, 2025. AY25 runs through Tuesday, January 13, 2026. Allocation balances from AY24 are NOT carried over to AY25 (except for ALCC projects).

Below is information related to the Allocation Year Transition plans. All times listed are Pacific Time, and all dates are in 2025 unless otherwise specified.

Changes Prior to the Transition

The following changes will be implemented in preparation for the AY transition.

Account Creation/Validation Moratorium January 8-15

No user accounts will be created between Wednesday, January 8 at noon and Wednesday, January 15 at 8 a.m.

No More New Project (ERCAP) Requests for AY24 after November 1, 2024

ERCAP requests for AY24 projects are no longer being accepted.

Allocation Year Transition Process

IRIS Banking and Account Management System Downtime

The Iris accounting web interface will be unavailable from 7 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday, January 15.

Web browser sessions that are active in the IRIS web interface before the downtime must be refreshed by logging out and then logging back in, in order to display accurate information for the new allocation year.

Scheduled System Downtimes

Perlmutter Maintenance

Perlmutter will be unavailable during maintenance from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Wednesday, January 15.

After the Allocation Year transition, the following queued jobs on Perlmutter will be deleted:

• jobs associated with non-continuing projects
• jobs associated with a continuing project that the user is no longer a member of for AY25
• "premium" jobs from users who no longer have access to the "premium" QOS
• "overrun" jobs
• held jobs older than 12 weeks

Jupyter Maintenance

Jupyter will be down for scheduled maintenance from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. (subject to change), and servers may not be available while the Perlmutter system is undergoing maintenance.

AY 2025 Charging Begins on January 16

Charging for AY25 will begin on Thursday, January 16 at midnight (the first moments of the day) or when Perlmutter returns from the scheduled maintenance, whichever is later. Note that CPU and GPU jobs are charged in separate CPU and GPU allocations.

Updates for AY25

New Appropriate Use Policy

The Appropriate Use of NERSC Resources Policy has been overhauled to better reflect the way that NERSC resources are used by the NERSC user community. This includes new and clarifying policies related to data sharing and other services. The updated policy will take effect in AY25, and all users will be required to attest to their agreement. Details on this process will be provided at a later date.

Changes in Programming Environment Software

This section will be updated with specific changes as the AY25 maintenance approaches.

Updates to the programming environment are expected but we do not anticipate any breaking changes.

Many software modules will be retired or updated. The following modules will be removed:

• math-libs-real32
• nersc_cr/23.06
• julia/1.10.0
• julia/1.10.1
• julia/1.10.2
• julia/1.10.3
• climate-utils/2023q2 (will be replaced)
• climate-utils/2023q2-old
• wannier90/3.1.0
• wannier90/3.1.0-nvidia
• wannier90/3.1.0-gnu
• eigen/3.4.0 (replaced by RPM for header file)
• mumps/5.5.1-gcc-11.2.0
• spack/develop (defunct old spack install, new spack available)

Additional modules may be removed; we will attempt to keep this list updated with the latest information.

Jupyter Upgrade

During the scheduled maintenance on January 15, multiple upgrades will be deployed to the Jupyter service. The upgrades include updating JupyterLab from version 3 to version 4, updating JupyterHub from version 4 to version 5, and upgrading the underlying infrastructure software stack that supports the service.

software.nersc.gov GitLab instance retirement

The software.nersc.gov GitLab instance will be discontinued with the end of AY24. Impacted users have already been informed of the retirement of the instance and informed of their options regarding data retrieval.

Allocations in AY25

AY25 Allocation Award Notifications

The AY25 allocation award letters will be emailed to project PIs during the week of December 16, 2024. On January 15, new allocations of CPU time, GPU time, and mass storage will be in effect. Unused allocations from AY24 do not carry over into the new allocation year, except for ALCC projects. (ALCC projects should see the remainder of their 2024/25 ALCC awards reflected in their NERSC 2025 allocation. It may take one or two days for the continuing balance to be updated on our systems. 2024/25 ALCC time expires on June 30, 2025.)

Continuing Projects

Projects are continuing if the project was active in AY24 and was renewed for AY25. PIs for projects continuing from AY24 to AY25 should complete the following tasks.

By January 10: Select Users to "continue" and Allow "premium" QOS

PIs and/or PI Proxies for renewing projects must manually authorize each user in their project that should continue to be a member in AY25 and to enable selected users (if any) to use the "premium" QOS. These authorizations must be completed by Friday, January 10. Instructions for performing the Continuing User and "premium" QOS authorization are available in the Iris documentation. Note: Percentages allowed for each user for CPU and GPU allocations are inherited from AY24 settings (Hours allowed are not inherited).

After January 15: Verify Correctness and Manage Non-Continuing Members

PIs should check/update CPU and GPU allocations allowed for each user in Iris once AY2025 starts. PIs should also check if the users you have chosen to "continue" and/or have "premium" QOS access are correctly reflected in Iris.

PIs should also manage data owned by non-continuing project members. For data in CFS, PI and PI proxies can use the PI Toolbox to submit requests to change owner/group and permissions. For data on other file systems, please submit a NERSC help ticket.

New Projects

When a new project is created, its initial membership consists only of the PI designated in the ERCAP proposal.

Beginning January 15: Add Users to Project

The PI (and any users added by the PI and subsequently designated as PI Proxies) may add other users to the project after the new AY starts and the project has been activated. Instructions for adding users to projects can be found in IRIS Guide for PIs.

In addition, new users may request an account and to be added to the new project, beginning on January 15. They cannot request to be added to a new project until this date.

New Users

After January 15, new users may request to have themselves added to projects; these user-initiated additions must then be approved by the PI or a PI Proxy. See How to Get a NERSC Account.

Requests for new users for both the renewing and new projects may incur a delay while their identities are being vetted per DOE requirements.

Discontinued Users

A user will be considered "discontinued" if that user is not an authorized user in at least one active AY25 project.

Users in 2024 projects are not automatically authorized for 2025; a PI or PI Proxy must authorize each user for 2025 via the Continuing User process. If a user has been inadvertently discontinued, the PI can easily re-add them to the project within the first two months of the allocation year (they can be re-added later, too, with a bit more effort).

All discontinued users will have data access only to their authorized systems (Perlmutter, HPSS, DTNs, Spin etc.) for 60 days until March 14, 2025. Such users will be unable to submit batch jobs, but only able to perform limited interactive tasks. The intent of this access is to allow discontinued users the ability to "clean up" and transfer files back to their home institution. Discontinued users should shut down their running services (such as in Spin).

Discontinued Projects

A project that was active in AY24 and was not renewed for AY25 is considered discontinued. The PI and project team are responsible for cleaning up after the project, and transferring any files owned by the project to non-NERSC locations before the access to the project data is lost on March 15.

By March 14: Shut Down Services and Archive Data

Data located in Perlmutter scratch, CFS, Global Common, HPSS, and Spin (including Registry) should be cleaned up and transferred to non-NERSC locations. Any running services (such as in Spin) should also be shut down and associated data or artifacts that are to be preserved (such as workload definitions, contents of persistent volumes, container images, etc.) should also be copied to non-NERSC locations.