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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.

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$ module load powertools
$ buyin_status -l

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:

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$ module load powertools
$ buyin_status -l

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. Both test1 and classres correspond to partitions with the same name.

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.

If you would like to change your default account, you can do so with sacctmgr. In the example above, if fordste5 wants to change their default account to test1, they can do so with the command

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sacctmgr modify user name=fordste5 set DefaultAccount=test1

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 coordinators on a buy-in account:

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$ sacctmgr show account <account_name> withcoord

Add a new coordinator to a buy-in account:

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$ sacctmgr add coordinator <userid> account=<account>

Remove a coordinator from a buy-in account:

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$ sacctmgr del coordinator <userid> account=<account>

View what users have access to your buy-in account:

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$ sacctmgr show association where account=<account>

Add a user to your buy-in account:

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$ sacctmgr add user name=<userid> account=<account>

Remove a user from your buy-in account:

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$ sacctmgr delete user <userid> where account=<account>

Checking the Status of Buy-Ins

The status of buy-ins can be viewed with the buyin_status powertool.

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$ module load powertools
$ buyin_status -a classres

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 have the same name as a given buy-in account