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 NIRD.

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, staff and students at project member sites and associate partners are welcome to use the NLPL virtual laboratory. (Sub-)Allocation decisions (within NLPL) are made by the infrastructure task force; thus, please make sure to make contact with us before submitting account applications.

For Abel, there is an on-line account application form at https://www.metacenter.no/user/application/. Please request association with Notur project NN9447K. 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 Norwegian point of contact for these projects, but please direct all inquiries to the NLPL infrastructure task force.

For Taito, there is an on-line account application form at https://sui.csc.fi/web/guest/csc-customer-registration/. Martin Matthiesen will need to approve NLPL-related account requests and manages allocation ‘projects’ (one per site). Stephan Oepen manages the on-line storage on Taito (‘/proj/nlpl/’). For all technical questions, please contact the NLPL infrastructure task force.

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.

Taito Usage Statistics

Id	Project	Principal Investigator	Users 2017	Units 2017	Users 2018	Units 2018	Users 2019	Units 2019
2000509	Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing	Joakim Nivre	7	531,099	10	609,617
2000582	Neic-NLPL	Stephan Oepen	-	-	3	62,298
2000661	NLPL-OPUS	Jörg Tiedemann	1	28,959	2	27,0915
2000288	BAULT	Jörg Tiedemann	1	992	1	7,089
2000309	CrossNLP	Jörg Tiedemann	10	84,4404	15	1,808,416
tuy4622	Textual Data Mining for Bioinformation Management	Filip Ginter	9	891,837	10	558,113
2000391	TurkuNLP EDU	Filip Ginter	1	142,808	2	177,932
2000989	UCPH part of NeIC-NLPL	Anders Søgaard	-	-	5	107,657
2001006	NLPL-ITUNLP	Leon Derczynski	-	-	7	345
Total			26	2,440,099	47	3,602,382

Abel Usage Statistics

Allocations (and statistics) on Abel are organized into six-months periods (called, for example, 2018.1), which start in April and October each year. The table below shows the sum of hours for two allocation periods in a given ‘year’ (e.g. 2016.2 and 2017.1 for the first NLPL project year), and the maximum count of active users across the two periods.

Id	Project	Principal Investigator	Users 2017	Hours 2017	Users 2018	Hours 2018	Users 2019	Hours 2019
NN9447K	NLPL	Stephan Oepen	7	202,080	16	203,590
NN9107K	DELPH-IN21	Stephan Oepen	8	1,981,377	10	214,644
Total			15	2,183,457	26	418,234