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Investing in our cluster and available resources increase UW’s overall HPC resource utilization for more efficient use of university-wide research computing dollars.
Overall node purchasing and sharing offers scaling benefits by reducing university-wide costs associated decentralized HPC infrastructure, maintenance, equipment, and support staff. As a researcher you would not need to investigate all components required to make a server work.
HPC Condominium Model
Our MedicineBow and Beartooth cluster clusters follows a condominium-style model of resource management. Investors, which are individual researchers or groups of researchers, work with us at ARCC to purchase compute nodes and storage. These resources are then installed in our cluster and administered by the ARCC system administrators.
When the investor-purchased resources aren’t in use by the investor defined users, they will be made available to the community. This type of arrangement is referred to as a backfill queue. However, this general access to investor-owned resources can be immediately revoked when the investors wish to use their resources. The job will automatically be re-queued to ease the burden on users. Investors are also given priority on the backfill queue.
Idle compute resources are made available to the general user community through a shared backfill queue that includes all compute nodes. However, this general access to resources can be preempted at any time by investors when they want to use the resources they have purchased.
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