The Allocations and Advisory Committee (AAC) for the University of Maryland HPC clusters is composed of University of Maryland faculty with significant experience in high-performance computing (HPC) and familiarity with the campus HPC environment, and representing those research groups who have contributed hardware to one of the Deepthought clusters. The members of the HPCC AAC are listed below:
AAC Committee Members
Access to AAC private area (restricted to AAC members only).
The Allocations and Advisory Committee serves dual roles. First, it provides oversight and develops policy on the deployment and use of the University of Maryland HPC clusters. Second, the committee is responsible for allocating time on the clusters (both the CPU cycles the Division of IT has contributed to the two Deepthought clusters, and the time on the state funded MARCC/bluecrab cluster) The committee solicits and reviews requests allocation requests, and approve and prioritize proposals. Criteria used in making such determinations include appropriateness of the clusters for the intended computation, the specific hardware and/or software requested, a researcher's prior experience with high-performance computing, the track record of a requestor who has received HPCC allocations in the past, and the overall merits of the research itself.
Allocations of compute time are provided as service units (SUs), each of which represents roughly one hour of wall clock time on one CPU core. Different categories of allocations provide cycles for newcomers (development: 20K SUs), for moderately demanding jobs (small: 60K SUs), and for compute-intensive research (large: 100K SUs). The larger allocations are naturally scrutinized more, and generally require the applicant to have shown reasonable knowledge of HPC and its issues, either from previous development grants or other experience on this or other clusters.
The AAC will determine which of the HPC clusters is most appropriate for the request.
See the section on obtaining an allocation from the AAC for information on getting access to the University HPC resources.
Both of the Deepthought clusters grow by the contribution of hardware to the clusters by various research groups, in return for a high priority allocation of time on the cluster (proportional to the amount of compute power their contribution adds to the cluster), renewed quarterly. If you are interested or have questions regarding being a contributer to the cluster, please contact the AAC committee chair
Because maintaining a first class HPC environment is expensive, it
is important that you
acknowledge your use of our clusters in publications
which benefitted from these campus resources. Such acknowledgements
help to convince the people in charge of budgets of the value of these
resources, and help us obtain funding to maintain and grow them. We
also ask that you inform us
of publications which acknowledge the use of one of the clusters.
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