The following are frequently asked questions we have received from our user community after the end of the extended grace period on March 31 in accordance to the new cost model., which we are sharing with the community:
Q: Where can I find an updated NSF style facilities and equipment document?
A: Please see our page at https://pace.gatech.edu/sample-nsf-application-boilerplate-describing-pace-hpc
Q: I had a cluster I bought back in 2013, can I access this cluster?
A: No. We have decommissioned all clusters from Rich datacenter as part of the Rich to Coda datacenter migration plan. As part of our earlier communication to PIs, if a PI owned a cluster in Rich datacenter, they received a detailed summary of their charge account(s) for the Phoenix cluster that included the amount of compute credits allocated to their account based on the compute equipment that was refreshed. To see your list of available charge account(s) and their credit balance, please run pace-quota on the Phoenix cluster.
Q: I do not have funds to pay for the usage of the Phoenix cluster at this time, can I get access to Phoenix at no cost?
A: As part of this transition, PACE has taken the opportunity to provide all Institute Faculty with computational and data resources at a modest level. All academic and research faculty (“PIs”) participating in PACE are automatically granted a certain level of resources in addition to any additional funding they may bring. Each PI is provided 1TB of project storage and compute credits (68) equivalent to 10,000 CPU-hours (per month) on a 192GB compute node. These credits may be used towards any computational resources (e.g., GPUs, high memory nodes) that are available within the Phoenix cluster. In addition, all PACE users also have access to the preemptable backfill queue at no cost.
Q: Do I need to immediately begin providing funding to use Phoenix beyond the free tier?
A: Not necessarily. If you had access to paid resources in Rich, you now have access to a refresh CODA20 account with an existing balance, as described to each faculty owner. The number of credits in that account is equivalent in computational power to 5 years of continuous use of your old cluster in the Rich Datacenter.