Allocation Year Transition: 2023 to 2024

The NERSC 2023 Allocation Year (AY23) ends at 7 a.m. Pacific Time on Wednesday, January 17, 2024. AY24 runs through Tuesday, January 14, 2025. Allocation balances from AY2023 are NOT carried over to AY2024.

Below is information related to the Allocation Year Transition plans. All times listed are Pacific Time, and all dates are in 2024 unless otherwise specified.

Changes Prior to the Transition

The following changes will be implemented in preparation for the AY transition. 

Account Creation/Validation Moratorium January 10-16

No user accounts will be created between Wednesday, January 10 at noon and Wednesday, January 17 at 8 a.m.

No More New Project (ERCAP) Requests for AY23 after November 1, 2023

ERCAP requests for AY2023 projects are no longer being accepted.

Allocation Year Transition Process

IRIS Banking and Account Management System Downtime

The Iris accounting web interface will be unavailable from 7 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday, January 17.

Web browser sessions that are active in the IRIS web interface before the downtime must be refreshed by logging out and then logging back in, in order to display accurate information for the new allocation year.

Scheduled System Downtimes

Perlmutter will be unavailable during maintenance from 6 a.m to 10 p.m. on Wednesday, January 17.

After the Allocation Year transition, the following queued jobs on Perlmutter will be deleted:

• jobs associated with non-continuing projects
• jobs associated with a continuing project that the user is no longer a member of for AY24
• "overrun" jobs
• held jobs older than 12 weeks

Jupyter access may be impacted depending on Perlmutter status, such as login and compute nodes availability.

AY 2024 Charging Begins on January 18

Charging for AY24 will begin on Thursday, January 18 at midnight (the first moments of the day). Any jobs run after the maintenance concludes but before January 18 will not be charged for the time they used on January 17. Note that CPU and GPU jobs are charged in separate CPU and GPU allocations.

Updates for AY24

New Appropriate Use Policy

The Appropriate Use of NERSC Resources Policy is being updated to better reflect the way that NERSC resources are used by the NERSC user community. The updated policy will take effect in AY24, and all users will be required to attest to their agreement. Details on this process will be provided at a later date.

New Software Default in Programming Environment 

During the scheduled maintenance on the first day of AY24, January 17, 2024, the default Cray Programming Environment (CPE) will be updated to 23.12. As a consequence of this update, the default cudatoolkit module version will be updated to cudatoolkit/12.2, and the gcc compiler will now be provided by the underlying SLES OS. 

We expect most users should not need to re-compile their code. Please refer to the Perlmutter Timeline page and the user announcement email for more details. 

New Default Inode Quota for Projects on CFS

The default inode quota for a project on CFS will be decreased from 20 M to 10 M from the start of the AY24. There are no existing user impacts from this change.

Allocations in AY24

AY24 Allocation Awards

The AY24 allocation award letters will be emailed to project PIs during the week of December 11, 2023. On January 17, new allocations of CPU time, GPU time, and mass storage will be in effect. Unused allocations from AY23 do not carry over into the new allocation year, except for ALCC projects. (ALCC projects should see the remainder of their 2023/24 ALCC awards reflected in their NERSC 2024 allocation. It may take one or two days for the continuing balance to be updated on our systems. 2023/24 ALCC time expires on June 30, 2024.)

PIs and/or PI Proxies for renewing projects must manually authorize each user in their project that should continue to be a member in AY24 and to enable selected users for using "premium" QOS. Authorizations must be completed by Friday, January 12. Instructions for performing the Continuing User and "premium" QOS authorization are available in the Iris documentation. Note: Percentages allowed for each user for CPU and GPU allocations are inherited from AY23 settings. Hours allotted for each user will NOT be inherited, as allocations vary from year to year. PIs and/or PI Proxies should check and update them in Iris after the new allocation year starts. If both percentage and hours are set, then the percentage setting takes precedence.  If neither percentage or hours is set for a user, then the default percentage of 10% will be set.

New Projects

When a new project is created, its initial membership consists only of the PI designated in the ERCAP proposal. The PI (and any users added by the PI and designated as PI Proxies) may add other users to the project after the new AY starts and the project has been activated. Instructions for adding users to projects can be found in IRIS Guide for PIs. In addition, new users may now request to have themselves added to projects; these user-initiated additions must then be approved by the PI or by a PI Proxy. See How to Get a NERSC Account. Users will not be able to request accounts in new projects until after the new AY starts and the new project has been provisioned.

New Users

Requests for new users for both the renewing and new projects may incur a delay while their identities are being vetted per DOE requirements.

Discontinued Users

A user will be considered "discontinued" if that user is not an authorized user in at least one active AY24 project.

Users in 2023 projects are not automatically authorized for 2024; a PI or PI Proxy must authorize each user for 2024 via the Continuing User process. Instructions for this process will be emailed to PIs/Proxies when the process is available.)

All discontinued users will have data access only to their authorized systems (Perlmutter, HPSS, DTNs, etc) for 60 days, until March 16, 2024. Such users will be unable to submit batch jobs, but will be able to perform limited interactive tasks. The intent of this access is to allow discontinued users the ability to "clean up" and transfer files back to their home institution.