Skip to content

Buy-In and Account Management

If you want to have priority access to our clusters, you can purchase buy-in nodes. Users who run on buy-in nodes receive priority access to their nodes within 4 hours and are exempt from the 1 million CPU hour per year limit.

Priority access to buy-in nodes is controlled through the SLURM partitioning system. See SLURM Queueing and Partitions for more information. The sections below describe how to manage accounts in SLURM to ensure access to buy-in partitions.

Checking Default Account

When submitting a job without specifying an account, your default account is used. You can check your default account using the buyin_status power tool.

If you don't already have the powertools module loaded, load it with

1
module load powertools

input
1
buyin_status -l
output
1
2
3
User:     fordste5
Accounts: test1_classres test1 classres
Default:  classres

User fordste5 has a default account of classres. If fordste5 submits a job without specifying an account, it will be submitted to the classres partition. If the job requested four hours or less of wall time, it will be submitted to the general-short partition as well. Jobs submitted by users with a default account of general will be queued in the general-long and general-short partitions. See How jobs are assigned to queues for a complete listing of queue assignments.

Using Non-Default Accounts

You can see what accounts you have access to using the buyin_status powertool:

input
1
buyin_status -l
output
1
2
3
User:     fordste5
Accounts: test1_classres test1 classres
Default:  classres

This output shows that fordste5 is a member of the test1_classres, test1, and classres buy-in accounts. All users have access to the general account, so it is not shown in this list.

Because fordste5 has a default account of classres, if they want to submit jobs to test1, they will have to explicitly specify the test1 account at submission. This is done by using either the -A test1 option for srun/sbatch/salloc, or by adding the #SBATCH -A test1 directive to their batch script.

Managing Buy-In Account Membership

Buy-in accounts can be assigned account coordinators. Account coordinators can perform a number of operations on the buy-in accounts they coordinate as well as on the jobs queued to those accounts, including adding/removing users, adding/removing coordinators, and cancelling or requeueing buy-in jobs.

View members and coordinators of a buy-in account:

1
buyin_status --members --account classres

Add a new coordinator to a buy-in account:

1
buyin_status --account <Account> --add-coordinator <NetID>

Remove a coordinator from a buy-in account:

1
buyin_status --account <Account> --rm-coordinator <NetID>

Add a user to a buy-in account:

1
buyin_status --account <Account> --add-user <NetID>

Remove a user from your buy-in account:

1
buyin_status --account <Account> --rm-user <NetID>

Checking the Status of a Buy-In

The status of a buy-in account can be viewed with the buyin_status powertool.

input
1
buyin_status -a classres
output
 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
User:     fordste5
Accounts: test1_classres test1 classres
Default:  classres


Buyin: classres
  JOBID      STATE      USER       CPUS PRIORITY  TIME_LIMIT           START_TIME
  17401      RUNNING    fordste5   10   101          1:00:00  2018-08-09T12:55:17
  17409      RUNNING    changc81   4    100          1:00:00  2018-08-09T12:57:54

  Partition: classres
    lac-421 (down*)
    csn-020 (down*)
    csp-018 (down*)
    css-034 (down*)
    css-035 (down*)
    css-079 (down*)
    css-080 (down*)
    css-033 (allocated)
      JOBID      ACCOUNT    USER       CPUS       TIME  TIME_LEFT
      17402      general    fordste5   10         4:36      55:24
      17401      classres   fordste5   10         4:36      55:24

This tool will list all jobs that are queued for a buy-in account, all nodes associated with the buy-in account–including node status–and a list of jobs running on each node. Because jobs with a wall time of four hours or less can run on any buy-in node, it is possible to see jobs running on buy-in nodes from other accounts.

Buy-in partitions generally have the same name as a given buy-in account. Some buy-in accounts have specialized partitions for GPU or Nvidia Grace nodes. These partition will have names like <buyin>-gpu or <buyin>-grace.