Access
Access to the C3P facility is gained by opening / annually renewing an account. This is done simply by compiling the form that can be downloaded at the end of this page. There are different types of accounts, each giving access to different kinds of hardware, to be chosen based on the needs of the research conducted (i.e. the kind of computations that need to be carried out).
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Definitions
Account: is the username/password pair that gives access to one or more computational resources. A share quota is associated to each account, per cluster. The share counts the amount of resources that can be used with respect to the other accounts. Such a quota enters in the fairshare (see Support page) management of the cluster queue, thus it affects how the priority of the job changes in time. The latter will decrease (or increase) as the account usage of the HPC resources increases (or decreases) in time. Each account remains active for 1 year and can be opened / renewed by ensuring the amount reported in the table below. Three main categories of account are available: base, extended and complete. They are all briefly described in the table below. Please, take a look at the Clusters page for more information on the available HPC resources.
Account referent: is the referent for the payment and the one responsible of the good behaviour of the users. An account referent can request to open more than one account, which can be of different type. Each account remains active for one year. After this period, the account(s) will be closed without any explicit renewal request from the account referent.
Annual costs
The table below reports the types of accounts that are available and their annual cost.
| Account type | Annual cost / Euro | Cluster |
| Base | 500 | Avogadro |
| Complete | 2000 | All the clusters |
Contributions to C3P
The HPC facility, beyond the normal maintenance, requires updates in the power and conditioning plants, as well as, update of the computers and of the software licenses. While the accounts prices are calculated to guarantee the normal function of the facility, the more expensive updates require much more funding. Such a contribution had always come from funds of research projects of whom that are interested in keeping C3P alive and functional, and we hope that these contributions will continue. Two types of benefits are applied to colleagues that participated and will participate to the update of the C3P facility in the future.
Update of the structure
Discounts are applied to whom that in the last 5 years contributed to the maintenance and update of the structure (power and conditioning plants). The discount is calculated as
where C is the annual cost of the account, x is the contribution to the structure in the last 5 years, and xtot is the total contribution to the structure in the last 5 years.
Expenses for the clusters
The second benefit is an increase of the share to whom that in the last 5 years contributed to the purchase of new nodes on the clusters. See the Support page, in the fairshare section, to see how the benefit is applied.
Account request / renewal
Account referents willng to request a new access, or to renew the access, to the C3P resources are encouraged to complete the request form, and send it by e-mail to c3p.chimica@unipd.it.
The form can be compiled and sent to the C3P staff at any time. The account(s) will remain active (i.e. can submit jobs) for 1 year after the opening / renewal.
