[Berzelius-users] Temporarily cheaper GPU billing

[Filip Polbratt]

Dear Berzelius users,

The temporarily cheaper GPU billing will remain until Monday the 28th of 
August. On that day the billing will return to the normal level.

Best regards,
Filip Polbratt

On 2023-08-09 15:26, Henrik Henriksson wrote:
> 
> Dear Berzelius users,
> 
> As much of the work done on Berzelius is somewhat interactive, and we 
> currently
> have 34 new nodes, there is currently quite a lot of "air" in the 
> queues. For
> projects with smaller allocations this is a good opportunity to grab 
> some extra
> compute time on the cluster.
> 
> Slurm, the scheduler on Berzelius, schedules according to a "fair-share"
> algorithm. The allocation (say 240 GPUh/month) is *not* a quota, but a 
> weight
> used when setting queue priorities. If everyone schedules as much as 
> they can,
> the monthly usage per project will approximate the allocation. The queue
> priority is based on the allocation and "recent usage" (exponential 
> falloff, 21
> days half life).
> 
> As such, when the queues are short, a lower priority is needed to get a job
> scheduled. However, if you use a lot more than your allocation (say 8x), 
> it will
> take quite a lot of time (something like log_2(8)*21 days) before your 
> queue
> priority returns to normal.
> 
> To allow for projects to go above their allocation by *a lot* without being
> punished in the future, we have *temporarily* reduced the cost of 
> running jobs to
> 1/8th of normal billing.
> 
> When there is less air in the system and the new nodes fill up, we will 
> return
> this to normal billing. This means that GPU hours you use now will *not* 
> reduce
> your priority (that much) when we turn the cost back up again.
> 
> We will send out a notice before we turn the billing back to normal 
> again, at
> least a day before doing so, so that users utilizing this temporary billing
> reduction can cancel their jobs if they so desire.
> 
> If you want more information on how the scheduling algorithm works, 
> Berzelius is
> set up very similar to Tetralith, as described on our website [1].
> 
> As always, please reach out to us if you have any questions or comments.
> 
> 
> TL;DR: Firesale on Berzelius-GPUs, 87.5% off everything until we go back to
> normal pricing. Discount does not apply to storage and is time limited. 
> (But
> please read the entire email.)
> 
> [1] https://www.nsc.liu.se/support/batch-jobs/tetralith/fair-share/
>