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Sydney Scheme
What is the Sydney Scheme?
The Sydney Scheme provides University-subsidised access to national HPC facilities: NCI’s Gadi and Pawsey’s Setonix HPCs. Access to NCI and Pawsey systems will be an ongoing feature of the Sydney Research Cloud initiative. USyd purchases and distributes Service Units from NCI (and shortly Pawsey) on a quarterly basis to both of these systems.
Conditions use for Sydney Scheme
Allocations are not merit-assessed but are subject to the following conditions of use to ensure fairness, efficient utilisation, and sustainability of this service.
Eligibility
The listed Lead CI for each project must be a University of Sydney staff member actively engaged in research
Students are not eligible to be Lead CIs, though they may be listed as users under eligible projects
Projects must be used solely for research projects, as described in the original project application. Use of resources for non-research activities is not permitted
Allocations
Each Lead CI may request up to 250,000 service units (SU) per quarter across all their projects
While we expect most Lead CIs will have only one project, researchers can have multiple projects as required
New projects will be provisioned with a starter allocation of 2,000 SU for testing and onboarding. A formal request for additional SUs can be submitted via the allocation portal
New projects requesting gdata will be provisioned with 10 GB allocation. Increases to this can be made via email request to the scheme manager with justification. Large gdata allocations are only made to users who require it for shared project resources that are regularly required as compute job input (eg databases, reference files, locally installed tools) over long periods of time. Input data does not usually meet this description. Justification must include a description of why regular backups to RDS from scratch are inadequate.
Resource management
Lead CIs are responsible for monitoring usage, managing team access, and requesting any top ups within the quarter
Top ups can be requested at any time, subject to SU availability and approval
Reclaims
NCI service units do not roll over to the next quarter
In order to promote equitable access and avoid idle allocations, unused service units will be reclaimed periodically for redistribution to active projects
Project allocations that have been adjusted (new projects or increased allocations) in the 10 days prior to the reclaim will be exempt from reclaim
In the first week of the final month of each quarter, a reclaim process will occur. During this process:
Projects that have used 0% of their allocation will have 100% of their remaining service units reclaimed
Projects that have used less than 10% of their allocations will have 75% of their remaining service units reclaimed
Lead CIs can request allocations are returned as needed
In the last week of the quarter, a reclaim process will occur. This will be a more stringent reclaim, to minimise watsed service units for the quarter that could be used for another project
Additional reclaims may be performed at the discretion of the Sydney Scheme managers depending on usage trends and overall demand
Policy changes
Sydney Scheme is designed to be responsive to the University’s research community needs. As such, we reserve the right to modify these conditions and allocation policies in response to usage patterns, emerging needs, and system constraints
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 NCI. 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). 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 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.
Create an NCI account
All new users must create their account through the NCI online self service portal. To create your account you will need the following information:
Your Name
Institutional email address (Gmail, Hotmail, etc. are not accepted)
Mobile phone number
Either:
NCI project code of an existing project you wish to join
A new project proposal to be assessed by a Scheme Manager to determine if they will grant your project time
Please keep in mind that currently if you don’t join an existing project or propose a project, you will receive a notification saying you’re “awaiting approval” but you will not get access to NCI’s systems unless you’re a member of a project. Don’t skip those steps. If you aren’t ready to join an existing or propose a research project and just want to get access to the system to explore (you will not be able to run jobs), you can apply to join qc03.
Click on ‘Sign up’ link on the NCI online self service portal:
Accept the terms and conditions:
Provide your personal details, ensuring to use your @sydney.edu.au or @uni.sydney.edu.au email address:
Provide details on the project you’ll be working on. To join an existing project select “I need to join one or more existing projects” and enter the NCI project code in the Projects menu. To propose a new project, see instructions below. If you select “I don’t need to join any project at this stage”, your account will remain pending until you join a project.
Select University of Sydney as your institution:
Your username will become active when a project Lead CI approves your request to join their project. You will receive a confirmation email from NCI when your username is activated.
Propose a new project
When creating an NCI project, you will be asked how many SUs and what optional storage (gdata and massdata) you will require.
1 KSU = 1,000 service units, which is roughly equivalent to 500 CPU hours depending on the type of resource used. We expect 1 KSU to be a sufficient starting amount for most projects coming from Artemis. If you have a good understanding that you will require more than this, please enter those values here. They can easily and quickly be increased at a later date if needed.
Most projects will not require massdata. Some may require gdata, and this can be added later if necessary. All new projects are allocated 1 TB scratch space and this comes at no charge, however the other two file systems have an attached cost.
To create your account, follow the process outlined above up to Step 3 of 5 - Project and then:
On the NCI page Step 3 of 5 - Project, select “I intend to propose a new project”
Complete the account creation form and verify your account by following the account verification email
Once activated, you can login to MyNCI and propose a new project by selecting this from the menu bar on the left.
Follow the prompts to fill the form for your proposed project
At Propose a project: step 5 of 10, select University of Sydney
At Propose a project: step 6 of 10, select Gadi (at NCI) under HPC compute
At Propose a project: step 7 of 10, fill in your initial resource requirements in KSU.
Complete the rest of the form, ensuring that you carefully review the terms and conditions of use and declare the status of your project in relation to the Defence Trade Controls Act.
Join an existing project as an existing user
Login to MyNCI and select Projects and groups from the menu bar on the left
Switch the tab to Find project or group and search for the project you wish to join
Select the project from the search results, confirm the project by checking the overview, then switch the tab to Join
After agreeing to the terms and conditions, select Request membership. You membership needs to be approved by the Lead Chief Investigator
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: http://nci.sydney.edu.au
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 250 KSU per project per quarter. Please contact nci-sydney.scheme@sydney.edu.au for more infromation.
If you do not see your project listed on the management portal
This may be due to:
Your NCI email address is not 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 email your requested allocation adjustment to nci-sydney.scheme@sydney.edu.au who will apply the adjustment manually. After this manual adjustment, the project should be visible under the Sydney Scheme and future allocation adjustments can be made via the portal.
If neither of these solutions solve the issue, please contact nci-sydney.scheme@sydney.edu.au .
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 emailing nci-sydney.scheme@sydney.edu.au with a brief justification of the resource request.
Massdata allocations are typically not required, 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 Scheme managers: |
General questions regarding SRC project, Artemis timeline, special circumstances | Sydney Research Cloud Project: |
Optimising and troubleshooting your code | Sydney Informatics Hub help request |
Technical help, software installs, scratch storage increases | NCI helpdesk: help@nci.org.au
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Depending on your requirement for Service Units, you may wish to consider alternate methods of access at: https://nci.org.au/users/how-access-nci