Allocation Year Transition

Allocation Year 2025 Information Available in December 2024

The information on this page is historical. Information about the upcoming allocation year transition (2024 to 2025) will be posted in December 2024.

Allocation Year 2024 Information

The NERSC 2023 Allocation Year (AY23) ended at 7 a.m. Pacific Time on Wednesday, January 17, 2024. AY24 runs through Tuesday, January 14, 2025. Allocation balances from AY2023 were not carried over to AY2024.

Below is information related to the Allocation Year Transition plans. All times listed are Pacific Time, and all dates are in 2024 unless otherwise specified.

Changes Prior to the Transition

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

Account Creation/Validation Moratorium January 10-16

No user accounts created between Wednesday, January 10 at noon and Wednesday, January 17 at 8 a.m.

No More New Project (ERCAP) Requests for AY23 after November 1, 2023

ERCAP requests for AY2023 projects no longer accepted.

Allocation Year Transition Process

IRIS Banking and Account Management System Downtime

The Iris accounting web interface was be unavailable from 7 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday, January 17.

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

Scheduled System Downtimes

Perlmutter unavailable during maintenance from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Wednesday, January 17.

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

• Jobs associated with non-continuing projects
• Jobs associated with a continuing project that the user is no longer a member of for AY24
• “Overrun” jobs
• Held jobs older than 12 weeks

Jupyter access may have been impacted depending on Perlmutter status, such as login and compute nodes availability.

AY 2024 Charging Began on January 18

Charging for AY24 began at 12:00 a.m. on Thursday, January 18 (the first moments of the day). Any jobs run after the maintenance concluded but before January 18 were not charged for the time they used on January 17. Note that CPU and GPU jobs are charged in separate CPU and GPU allocations.

Updates for AY24

New Appropriate Use Policy

The Appropriate Use of NERSC Resources Policy was updated to better reflect the way that NERSC resources are used by the NERSC user community. The updated policy took effect in AY24, and all users were required to attest to their agreement.

New Software Default in Programming Environment

During the scheduled maintenance on the first day of AY24, January 17, 2024, the default Cray Programming Environment (CPE) was updated to 23.12. As a consequence of this update, the default cudatoolkit module version was updated to cudatoolkit/12.2, and the gcc compiler was provided by the underlying SLES OS.

New Default Inode Quota for Projects on CFS

The default inode quota for a project on CFS was decreased from 20 M to 10 M from the start of the AY24. There were no existing user impacts from this change.

Allocations in AY24

AY24 Allocation Awards

The AY24 allocation award letters were emailed to project PIs during the week of December 11, 2023. On January 17, 2024, new allocations of CPU time, GPU time, and mass storage were effect. Unused allocations from AY23 did not carry over into the new allocation year, except for ALCC projects. (ALCC projects should see the remainder of their 2023/24 ALCC awards reflected in their NERSC 2024 allocation. 2023/24 ALCC time expired on June 30, 2024.)

PIs and/or PI Proxies for renewing projects must manually authorize each user in their project that should continue to be a member in AY24 and to enable selected users to use “premium” QOS. Authorizations were to be completed by Friday, January 12. Instructions for performing the Continuing User and "premium" QOS authorization are available in Iris documentation. Note: Percentages allowed for each user for CPU and GPU allocations are inherited from AY23 settings. Hours allotted for each user will NOT be inherited, as allocations vary from year to year. PIs and/or PI Proxies should check and update them in Iris after the new allocation year starts. If both percentage and hours are set, then the percentage setting takes precedence. If neither percentage nor hours is set for a user, then the default percentage of 10% will be set.

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 added by the PI and 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 now request to have themselves added to projects; these user-initiated additions must then be approved by the PI or by a PI 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 and the new project has been provisioned.

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

Users not authorized in at least one active AY24 project were considered “discontinued.”

Users in 2023 projects were not automatically authorized for 2024; a PI or PI Proxy was required to authorize each user for 2024 via the Continuing User process. Instructions for this process were emailed to PIs/Proxies.

All discontinued users had data access only to their authorized systems (Perlmutter, HPSS, DTNs, etc) for 60 days until March 16, 2024. Such users were unable to submit batch jobs, but were able to perform limited interactive tasks. The intent of this access was to allow discontinued users the ability to “clean up” and transfer files back to their home institution.