Allocation Year Rollover: 2017 to 2018

The NERSC 2017 Allocation Year  (AY17) ends at 23:59:59 on Monday, January 8, 2018. AY18 runs from Tuesday, January 9, 2018 through Monday, January 07, 2019.

Below are major changes that will go into effect with the beginning of AY18 on Tuesday, January 9, 2018. All times listed are PST.

Scheduled System and Service Downtimes

The NIM accounting web interface will be unavailable for about one hour beginning at 8 am on January 9, 2018.

Cori and Edison will be unavailable during maintenance from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Tuesday January 9, 2018. The Slurm job scheduler will be upgraded to version 17.11 and new default Intel compiler and Cray software environment versions will set.  (intel/18.0.1.163 and Cray CDT/17.09 will be set to default). The following old Cray software versions will be removed on January 9. 2018: On Cori:Cray CDT 16.06, 16.10, 16.12, 17.02, 17.05, 17.08; On Edison: Cray CDT 16.06, 16.10, 17.05, 17.08; and on both Cori and Edison: intel/16.0.3.210, intel/17.0.1.132. Note: The Cray CDT (Cray Developer Toolkit) contains Cray compilers, the MPI message passing interface, performance and debugging tools, third party libraries, and other software.

No other systems and services are interrupted during the allocation rollover.

Charging Across AY Boundary

Batch jobs on Cori and Edison will not run across the AY charging boundary because the systems will be taken down for maintenance. Jobs run on Cori and Edison before the maintenance starts at January 9 at 6 a.m. will be charged to AY17 repos. Jobs run after the maintenance when systems are back up at 9 p.m. on January 9 will be charged to AY18 repos. After the maintenance, Queued ("idle") jobs associated with non-continuing repositories will fail. Jobs requesting KNL features other than quad, cache will be deleted from the queue; jobs that want to run in other KNL modes must request a reservation to do so in 2018. Pending 2017 "scavenger" jobs (those in the queue that had no AY17 allocations left) will also be deleted from the queue.

Premium QOS Disabled January 2-8

Beginning January 2, 2018, premium QOS jobs on Edison and Cori will have the same priority as normal QOS jobs. The premium QOS will be available again when the new allocation year starts.

AY18 Allocation Awards

The AY18 allocation award letters were e-mailed to project PIs during the week of December 18. On January 9, 2018, the new allocations of CPU time and mass storage will be in effect. Unused allocations from AY17 do not carry over into the new allocation year, except for ALCC projects. (ALCC projects should see the remainder of their 2017/18 ALCC awards reflected in their NERSC 2018 allocation. 2017/18 ALCC time expires on June 30, 2018.)

Accurate Information in NIM Requires a Browser Refresh

Web browser sessions that are active in the NIM web interface (nim.nersc.gov) at 8 a.m. PST on January 9, 2018, must be refreshed to display accurate information. Sessions can be refreshed by logging out and then logging back in.

New Repositories

When a new repository is created, its initial membership consists of the PI and any PI Proxies that were designated in the ERCAP proposal. The PI and/or Proxies may add other users to the repository after the new AY starts on January 9th and the repository has been activated. Instructions for adding users to repositories can be found in the "NIM User's Guide for PIs". In addition, new users may now add themselves to repositories; these user initiated additions must then be approved by the PI or by a Proxy. See How to Get a NERSC Account. Users should not request accounts in new repositories until after the new AY starts.

Account Creation/Validation Moratorium

No user accounts will be created between Tuesday, January 2, 2018 at noon and Tuesday, January 9, 2018 at 08:00.

Discontinued Users

Effective January 9, 2018, a user will be considered "discontinued" if that user is not associated with an active AY18 repository. (Note: It is possible for a PI or repository manager to drop users from continuing repositories.)

All discontinued users will have limited login access to their authorized systems until February 9, 2018. Such users will be unable to submit batch jobs, but will be able to perform limited interactive tasks. The intent of this access is to allow discontinued users the ability to "clean up", e.g., transfer files back to their home institution.

All discontinued users will continue to have write access to HPSS until February 9, 2018, and then read-only and delete access for six months (until August 9, 2018).

Exploratory Requests

Exploratory awards are small allocations made throughout the allocation year. Exploratory requests for AY2017 are no longer being accepted.