Hawk and Sol Usage Policy

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Director’s Discretionary Fund (DDF)

As described in the proposal,  DDF will be used for supporting the two REU programs, at least two courses each Fall and Spring, and one HPC Workshop in the summer.  The added SUs from SOL will be used for the following additional purposes - more courses per semester including capstone projects, summer research programs and workshops, and, trial allocations to new research groups for exploring Hawk’s capabilities. Unused SUs will be provided in order of precedence to Lehigh StartUp, Provost DF, and Lehigh Research.

Provost's Discretionary Fund (PDF)

These are allocations to be distributed at the discretion of Lehigh's Provost.

Research Computing Allocation Review Committee

Effective October 1, 2020,  there is no charge to use Lehigh's HPC resources - Sol and Hawk. Instead, Faculty are required to submit an allocation proposal that will be reviewed by a faculty driven Research Computing Allocation Review Committee (RCARC). The RCARC has representation from all five Colleges to ensure each College is involved in the decision making process to distribute HPC resources.

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Accounts

Lehigh Faculty, research staff and students can request an account on Sol/Hawk. All account requests by staff and students need to be sponsored by a Lehigh Faculty and be associated with an active allocation. A Lehigh faculty with no active allocation, can request an account for themselves and members of their group while requesting an allocation as described below. Accounts that do not have an active allocation for 6 months will be disabled. 

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Allocations

An allocation is a block of computing time measured in core-hours or service units or SUs (number of processing cores requested times the amount of wall-clock time used in hours). There is no charge to using Sol/Hawk  resources. However, users need to have an allocation to charge simulation time. There are different types of allocation depending on amount of SUs and storage.

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Eligibility

Only Full Time Lehigh faculty are eligible to be a PI on an allocation. Other users such as research staff including postdocs, graduate, and undergraduate students need to be associated with a Lehigh Faculty allocation. A user can be a member of multiple allocations, either the same faculty or different.

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Trial

Trial Allocations are geared towards first time HPC faculty who want to learn more about the capabilities of Sol/Hawk before requesting a startup or research allocation. Each allocation request will provide a maximum 10K SUs with a 6 month validity. 

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Eligibility Restriction: A Faculty who already has a startup or research allocation is not eligible for Trial Allocations. Trial Allocations are not a short term allocation block while waiting for the next allocation review cycle.  

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StartUp

Startup Allocations are small allocation requests (<25K). A faculty can be a PI or collaborator on only two active Startup Allocation at any time. 

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• Startup allocations that are expended within 6 months of the start date will be denied. PIs of such accounts will need to request a Research Allocation as described below.
• Any user can be associated with only 2 startup allocations at any given time.
  • The RCARC may request additional information if the StartUp Allocation request contains users who are already associated with a StartUp Allocation.
  • Requests to add existing users who have a StartUp Allocation after approval will automatically trigger a review by RCARC.

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Education

Developing the next generation workforce is a cornerstone of NSF campus research cyberinfrastructure grants. Use of Hawk for education - course work and workshops, is strongly encouraged.

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1. Course Number, Workshop Title, Summer Research Program Name
2. Brief description on how resources will be used.
3. Approximate number of users in the program.
   1. If number of users is greater than 25, consider discussing with A. Pacheco the appropriateness of Lehigh Resources vs XSEDE (or cloud computing).
4. List of applications to be used.

Research

Research Allocations are allocation requests larger than StartUp (>25K) with a maximum 300K allocation per Faculty.  A faculty can have multiple research allocations corresponding to multiple research projects. The total active SUs across all such projects including startup allocations should not exceed 300K at any time.
For example : John Doe has 4 existing projects with 30K, 40K, 80K, and 100K respectively for a total allocation of 250K SUs. John can be approved for an allocation provided the request is 50K SUs or less. Jane Doe who has similar projects but the smallest one expires at the end of the allocation cycle in 30 days can request a renewal with a maximum of 80K SUs. Jane’s total allocation until the end of the current cycle will be 250K and a total of 300K when the next cycle begins if the request is approved.

Active allocation is defined as an allocation that has not reached its end date. An expended allocation is active before its end date, it just cannot be used to charge computing time.

Requirement: A faculty requesting  a research allocation needs to submit a detailed research proposal. The proposal should contain the following -  

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Request Window: Research Allocations can be submitted during a one-month window every six months. Tentatively, there will be two allocation cycles with start dates of Jan 1 and Jul 1. Allocation window would be open two months prior to the start dates i.e. Nov 1 and May 1 respectively. (overlaps with XSEDE cycle 12/15-1/15 and 10/15-11/15).

Allocation Review: RCARC will review and approve allocations following the deadline but prior to the start of the allocation cycle i.e. in Dec and June every year. Please note that the RCARC is not reviewing your research project for its content or quality. The RCARC is only evaluating whether your request for resources match your proposed work. You cannot request 100K SUs when you need to run 10 jobs for 200 hours on 10 CPUs i.e. 2000 SUs each, 20K max. Depending on the total amount of SUs requested and the amount available, RCARC may approve your request with a reduced amount.

Renewal: Research allocations can be renewed annually. Renewals require a progress report of prior award and other information described in item 4 of requirements above.
Renewals that do not include a progress report will be reviewed and awarded but allocations will be available only after submission of the progress report. If a progress report is not provided within a month of the start date i.e. Feb 1 or Aug 1 depending on the cycle, then the allocation award will be withdrawn and all future requests will be declined in the absence of a progress report. E.g. John Doe requested a renewal of research allocation of 200K SUs that did not include a progress report. The RCARC will review the request and award an allocation subject to submission and review of the progress report within a month, say Jan 31. John and his collaborators do not have access to the 200K SUs until the report is submitted. If by Jan 31, the report is not submitted, then the 200K SU is returned to the RCARC, who can distribute at their discretion. On June 30, John’s other allocation, 100K, expires and he submits his renewal package by the May 31 deadline. If this renewal request does not contain the progress report for both the allocations, his renewal request will not be reviewed.

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Storage

Each HPC PI will be provided with a 1TB storage space that will provide home directory space of all accounts sponsored by that PI. PIs who have a large group can request a large space for home storage such that 1TB is provided for every 5 active users. It is the PI's responsibility to move inactive user's data to a backup storage solution and make room for active users. PI's who do not have an active allocation and have not applied for an allocation within 6 months of the expiry of the previous award will have the 1TB storage withdrawn with all data deleted with no backups. This space will be provided from the 40TB DDF. PIs who unnecessarily add users to the allocation to request more storage space will be restricted to 1TB space in subsequent years unless approved by RCARC.

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