Infrastructure/resources

Background

The NLPL initiative is supported by CSC and Sigma2, the Finnish and Norwegian national e-infrastructure providers, respectively. The project has received computing allocations on the Taito (Finland) and Abel (Norway) superclusters, which can be used by all project members. Additionally, moderate ‘on-line’ storage allocations are provided on both machines (accessible as ‘/projects/nlpl/’ on Abel, and ‘/proj/nlpl/’ on Taito), as well as a more generous storage allocation of 100 terabytes (in mid-2017) on NorStore.

Gaining Access

For the time being, there is no synchronization of user accounts across countries. Thus, project members need to obtain accounts separately for Abel and Taito. In mid-2017 at least, there are no procedures yet for non-members to use the NLPL allocations.

For Abel, there is an on-line account application form at https://www.metacenter.no/user/application/. Please request association with Notur project NN9447K and NorStore project NS9052K. It will usually take a day or two before account activation is complete, and you will receive status updates by email and text messages. Stephan Oepen (UiO) is the point of contact for these projects.

For Taito, Finnish users can apply on-line, while users from outside of Finland need to fill in, scan, and return an application form. Please follow the instructions by CSC: https://research.csc.fi/accounts-and-projects. Stephan Oepen manages the on-line storage on Taito (‘/proj/nlpl/’), and Martin Matthiesen can help with general issues regarding account creation and computing allocations.

Resource Allocations

At present (mid-2017), there are different allocation mechanisms for the two systems.

For Abel, allocations are made by the Norwegian Resource Allocation Committee for six-months periods, which start on April 1 and October 1, each year. NLPL received an allocation of 500,000 cpu hours for the allocation period 2016.2; of these, less than one third had been used by March 2017, and the allocation of period 2017.1 (lasting until the end of September 2017) was reduced (from the original estimates, in mutual agreement) to a fresh 500,000 hours. Towards the end of August 2017, it appears that NLPL usage on Abel actually has declined to some 50,000 hours in allocation period 2017.1; Stephan Oepen will optimistically request 200,000 hours for the next six-month period. All NLPL project members share these allocations and, over time, will need to find ways of using and distributing these resources fairly.

For Taito, each NLPL member site can be allocated its ‘own’ project, and CSC tends to make smaller allocations more frequently. The Steering Group has yet to develop a policy for how to make sure that the sum of these micro-allocations fit (fairly) within the bounds of the ‘blanket’ allocation of three million core hours over three years granted to NLPL as the CSC in-kind contribution.

Usage Statistics