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Sydney HPC Scheme
What is the Sydney HPC Allocation Scheme?
The Sydney Scheme provides University-subsidised access to national HPC facilities: NCI’s Gadi and Pawsey’s Setonix HPCs. USyd purchases and distributes Service Units from NCI and Pawsey on a quarterly basis to both of these systems. Access to these systems will be an ongoing feature of the Sydney Research Cloud ecosystem and will be provided in-kind with no direct cost to researchers within the quarterly allocation caps.
Conditions of use
Allocations are not merit-assessed but are subject to the following conditions of use to ensure fairness, efficient utilisation, and sustainability of this service.
What are service units?
NCI and Pawsey use a Service Unit (SU) model to track and manage compute usage. Think of SUs as currency that reflects the computational cost of your jobs. SUs help you to manage your compute budget and allow the University to distribute resources fairly across research projects.
Each job you run will consume SUs based on:
Number of CPU cores or GPUs (which are typically more expensive)
Memory requested
Storage
Job duration (wall time)
Partition or queue type
A Service Unit (SU) is the currency of Tier-1 HPCs. Different computational requirements (large memory, gpu, cpu, faster queue times etc) charge different amounts. SU are often reported as KSU (1,000 SU) and MSU (1,000,000 SU).
e.g. at NCI, 2SU ~ 1 Gadi cpu-core-hour, although this can vary based on the requested resources and queue.
Note that Service Units at NCI and Pawsey are not equal: 1 Pawsey SU is approximately equivalent to 2 NCI SU at the moment, in both cost and compute.
Accessing Pawsey
Complete our Pawsey onboarding form to be invited to create a Pawsey account and project:
Pawsey projects must be led by research staff at the University. Students should therefore get their supervisor to set up an Pawsey account and nominate themselves as lead CI on new projects.
Accessing NCI
To access any of NCI’s computing platforms including Gadi HPC, you first need to create an NCI account. You will also need to either create a new project or request to join an existing one. You can be a member of multiple projects. Resources at NCI are allocated to projects and not to individual users.
NCI projects must be led by research staff at the University. Students should therefore get their supervisor to set up an NCI account and nominate themselves as lead CI on new projects.
How do I request additional service units?
If you exhaust your allocation or anticipate requiring more computing time, you may request additional Service Units in the management portal: https://sih.tools/hpc-scheme
Note: you must be on the Sydney University network to access the portal. If you are off campus, you can connect remotely to the network via the University’s Virtual Private Network (VPN).
Projects can request additional SU for the current and next Quarter. The amount available for request may fluctuate between Quarters depending on overall demand. Excessive unused KSU will be reclaimed and redistributed in the final month of each Quarter.
Allocations are now capped at 300 KSU per LCI across all their projects in each quarter.
If you do not see your project listed on the management portal
This may be due to:
Your NCI email address is not set to your University of Sydney email address. Please log on to My NCI, select “About me” and change your email address.
Your project was created under a different allocation scheme. Please log a support request at https://sih.tools/request to have the adjustment applied manually. After this manual adjustment, the project should be visible under the Sydney HPC Allocation Scheme and future allocation adjustments can be made via the portal.
If neither of these solutions solve the issue, please contact submit a support request at https://sih.tools/request.
How do I request additional storage?
Increases to Gadi /scratch allocations can be requested via the NCI Helpdesk
Increases to /g/data allocations can be requested by completing the SIH request form with a brief justification of the resource request
Massdata allocations are not supported as The University of Sydney provides the Research Data Store for this service.
Resources and support
For enquiries relating to: | Contact point |
NCI project administration, service unit allocations, gdata storage increases | Sydney Informatics Hub request form: |
Pawsey project administration and service unit allocations | Sydney Informatics Hub request form: |
General questions regarding Sydney Research Cloud project, planned new infrastructure and services, as well as specialised compute requirements | Sydney Informatics Hub request form: |
Optimising and troubleshooting your code | Sydney Informatics Hub request form: |
NCI technical help, software installs, scratch storage increases | NCI helpdesk: help@nci.org.au
|
Pawsey technical help, software installs, Acacia storage increases | Pawsey helpdesk: help@pawsey.org.au |
NCI Gadi quickstart onboarding guide for USyd researchers | |
Pawsey Setonix quickstart onboarding guide for USyd researchers |
Depending on your requirement for Service Units, you may wish to consider alternate methods of access at: 
How to Access NCI | NCI