NERSCPowering Scientific Discovery for 50 Years

Allocation Reductions

Projects that are not using their allocation at a certain pace may have time returned to the allocation pool of their respective DOE Office of Science Program to be redistributed to other projects. (ALCC, Director's Reserve, Exploratory, and Educational projects are exempt from this reduction.) During AY 2023, we will be reviewing and removing both CPU and GPU Node hours. Projects are reminded that they may still run, in the Overrun queue, when they have exhausted their allocation for the year.

Allocation Year 2023

The following schedule will be used for Allocation Year 2023 (which runs from January 18, 2023 through January 16, 2024).

On April 19, 2023:

  • If a project has charged > 1% and <= 5% of its Node hour allocation, we will reduce their allocation by removing 15% of the unused balance.
  • If a project has charged <= 1% of its Node hour allocation, we will reduce their allocation by removing 25% of the unused balance. 

This reduction scheme will apply to both CPU and GPU allocations, but handled separately (e.g., a project that has charged 1% of its CPU allocation but 20% of its GPU allocation will see only its CPU allocation reduced by 25%).

**Requests for Exemptions from this first Allocation reduction will not be considered.

On July 19, 2023:

  • If a project has charged > 10% but <= 25% of its Node hour allocation, we will reduce their allocation by removing 25% of the unused balance.
  • If a project has charged <= 10% of its Node hour allocation, we will reduce their allocation by removing 50% of the unused balance.

On October 18, 2023:

  • If a project has charged > 20% but <= 40% of its Node hour allocation, we will reduce their allocation by removing 25% of the unused balance.
  • If a project has charged > 10% but <= 20% of its Node hour allocation, we will reduce their allocation by removing 75% of the unused balance.
  • If a project has charged <= 10% of its Node hour allocation, we will reduce their allocation by removing 90% of the unused balance.

Project Principal Investigators, PI Proxies or Project Resource Managers can request exemptions to this policy for the July and October reductions, but must make the request at least one week before the reductions are scheduled to take effect. Please make a request by creating a ticket at https://help.nersc.gov and include justification for the exemption.