Allocation Year Transition: 2022 to 2023

The NERSC 2022 Allocation Year (AY22) ends at 7 a.m. Pacific Time on Wednesday, January 18, 2023. AY23 runs through Tuesday, January 16, 2024.  Allocation balances from AY2022 are NOT carried over to AY2023.

Below is information related to the Allocation Year Transition plans. All times listed are Pacific Time, and all dates are in 2023 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 11-17

No user accounts will be created between Wednesday, January 11 at noon and Wednesday, January 18 at 8 a.m.

No More New Project (ERCAP) Requests for AY22 after October 3, 2022

ERCAP requests for AY2022 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 18.

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

Cori will be unavailable during maintenance from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Wednesday, January 18. Perlmutter will be unavailable during maintenance from 6 a.m on Wednesday, January 18 to 10 p.m. on Thursday, January 19.

After the Allocation Year transition, the following queued jobs on both Cori and 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 AY23
• "premium" jobs from users who no longer have access to the "premium" QOS
• "overrun" jobs
• held jobs older than 12 weeks

AY 2023 Charging Begins on January 19

Charging for AY23 will begin on Thursday, January 19 at midnight (the first moments of the day). Any jobs run after the maintenance concludes but before January 19 will not be charged for the time they used on January 18.  Note that CPU and GPU jobs are charged in separate CPU and GPU allocations.

Updates for AY23

New Appropriate Use Policy and NERSC User Code of Conduct Take Effect

NERSC’s Appropriate Use Policy is being updated for AY23 and a User Code of Conduct has been added. We will require all users to agree to these new terms. Users will attest their agreement by accepting the terms of the agreement when logging into Iris after January 18. Any user who has not completed this task by February 20 will be discontinued (see the “Discontinued Users” section below).

Discount for Preemptible Queue on Perlmutter

For the first month of the allocation year (from January 19, 2023 to February 19, 2023), all jobs that start in the preemptible queue on Perlmutter will run for free! After that, we will still provide a discount (but likely not a 100% discount).

Cori to Be Retired in March 2023

Cori was installed in 2015, and after more than six years may be NERSC's longest-lived system. Perlmutter, whose CPU partition provides computing power equivalent to all of Cori, is expected to be fully operational for Allocation Year 2023.

We plan to retire Cori in March 2023. Cori’s retirement timeline is as follows:

• October 17, 2022: Software freeze (no new user-facing software installed by NERSC)
• AY 2023: All allocations based on Perlmutter’s capacity only
• November-January: Cori to Perlmutter transition training focus & office hours
• Late January or early February: Announce the final date (T) for decommissioning
• T - 1 week: Implement reservation, preventing new jobs from running effective T
• T: Delete all jobs from the batch queue, no new jobs can be submitted; continue to allow login to retrieve files from Cori scratch
• T + 1 week: Close login nodes permanently
• T + 1 month: Disassembly begins

Allocations in AY23

AY23 Allocation Awards

The AY23 allocation award letters will be emailed to project PIs during the week of December 12, 2022. On January 18, new allocations of CPU time, GPU time, and mass storage will be in effect. Unused allocations from AY22 do not carry over into the new allocation year, except for ALCC projects. (ALCC projects should see the remainder of their 2022/23 ALCC awards reflected in their NERSC 2023 allocation. It may take one or two days for the continuing balance to be updated on our systems. 2022/23 ALCC time expires on June 30, 2023.)

PIs and/or PI Proxies for renewing projects must manually authorize each user in their project that should continue to be a member in AY23 and to enable selected users for using "premium" QOS. Authorizations must be completed by Friday, January 13. Instructions for performing the Continuing User and "premium" QOS authorization are available in the Iris documentation. Instructions for performing the Continuing User and "premium" QOS authorization are available in the Iris documentation.  Note: Hours or percentages allowed for each user for CPU and GPU allocations are inherited from AY22 settings, PIs and/or PI Proxies should check and update them in Iris after the new allocation year starts.

New Projects

When a new project is created, its initial membership consists only of the PI designated in the ERCAP proposal. The PI (and any users designated as 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 now request to have themselves added to projects; these user-initiated additions must then be approved by the PI or by a Proxy. See How to Get a NERSC Account. Users will not be able to request accounts in new projects until after the new AY starts.

New Users

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 AY23 project or, after the February 20, 2023 deadline the user has not agreed to the Code of Conduct and Appropriate Use Policy.

Users in 2022 projects are not automatically authorized for 2023; a PI or PI Proxy must authorize each user for 2023 via the Continuing User process. Instructions for this process will be emailed to PIs/Proxies when the process is available.)

All discontinued users will have limited login access to their authorized systems until February 20, 2023. 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 or archive them in HPSS.

All discontinued users will continue to have write access to HPSS until February 20, and then read-only and delete access for another 30 days (until March 20, 2023).