Allocation Year Rollover

Note: Allocation Year 2011 (AY11) ends at 23:59:59 on Monday, January 9, 2012. AY12 runs from Tuesday, January 10, 2012 through Monday, January 7, 2013.

Below are major changes that will go into effect with the beginning of AY12 on Tuesday, January 10, 2012. All times listed are PST.

Scheduled System Downtimes

There will be no service disruption during the allocation year rollover this year. Interactive and batch use will continue uninterrupted (except for "premium" jobs on Franklin and Hopper; see below).

All batch jobs will continue running during the rollover. Time accrued before midnight will be charged to AY11 repos; time accrued after midnight will be charged to AY12 repos. Running batch jobs that are associated with non-continuing repositories will have the AY12 component of their usage charged to a NERSC AY12 overhead repository. Queued ("idle") jobs associated with non-continuing repositories will fail upon startup in AY12.

Premium Queues Disabled

The "premium" batch queues on Franklin and Hopper were stopped at 15:00, Tuesday, January 3.  They will be restarted at 08:00, Tuesday, January 10.  Premium jobs that were running when the queues were stopped will run to completion.  Premium jobs that were queued but not running ("idle" status) will start and run normally.  That is, only job submission to the premium queues has been blocked.

AY12 Allocation Awards

The AY12 allocation award letters were e-mailed to project PIs on December 8. The awards are listed on the allocation awards web page. On January 10, the new allocations of CPU time and mass storage will replace those from AY11. Unused allocations do not carry over into the new allocation year.

Web Refreshing

Users must logout and login again to NIM to get a correct view of AY12 settings. This only applies to NIM sessions that are active at 00:01 on January 10. Also, note that an account usage summary is displayed for users that have logged in to the main NERSC website. This information is acquired from NIM. Therefore, users must logout and login on the main NERSC website for this information to be correct.

New Repositories

When a new repository is created, its initial membership consists of the PI and any PI Proxies that were designated in the ERCAP proposal. It is then the responsibility of the PI and/or Proxies to add other users to the repository. Instructions for adding users to repositories can be found here.

Account Creation/Validation Moratorium

No user accounts will be created or validated after Tuesday, January 3 at noon until Tuesday, January 10 at 08:00. Any such changes made in NIM during this time will not take effect until after AY12 begins.

Discontinued Users

Effective January 10, a number of current (AY11) users will be considered "discontinued". This can happen for the following reasons:

• A user belongs to only one AY11 project that is not being supported in AY12.
• A user has been explicitly dropped from a repository by the Principal Investigator or Project Manager of that repository.

All discontinued MPP users will have limited login access to their authorized machines until February 10. 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", e.g., transfer files back to their home institution.

All discontinued users will continue to have write access to HPSS until February 10, and then limited read-only and delete access for six months (until August 10, 2012). This will allow such users to transfer important data back to their home institution or to active NERSC users and to delete files that are no longer needed.

Deadline for AY11 Startup Requests

Startup awards are small allocations made throughout the allocation year. The deadline for AY11 startup awards was 17:00, Wednesday, December 21. Any startup requests submitted after this deadline will not be processed until after AY12 starts on January 10.