Request an Allocation
Access to the various resources is gained by requesting an "Educational Allocation" to work on that system. Only eligible Faculty or Instructional Staff can request educational allocations to support academic classes.
Instructions for requesting an allocation are different depending on the identity of your institution and which resource you are requesting. All instructions can be found by visiting the Allocations page
Types of Allocations
The different types of Allocations that can be requested are:
Startup
Startup projects are meant to provide the PI with an adequate allocation to benchmark and test to build a case for a Research or Educational project. Startup projects will typically receive small allocations with short durations.
PIs can apply for a Startup project allocation at any time.
Educational
Educational project allocations support academic classes, with limited allocation sizes and only on certain TACC resources.
Educational project allocations will last for the duration of the class plus 14 days.
Research
Research project allocations support the computational needs of the scientific community. Research project allocations begin on calendar quarters, are normally for one year, and must be renewed annually for multi-year projects. Requests for new research allocations and renewals must be submitted 30 days prior to the start of the allocation period. Requests submitted after the due date will be considered for the next allocation period. PIs can apply for startup project allocations until the next research project quarterly deadline.
Research allocation requests are reviewed four times per year according to the schedule of deadlines:
| Allocation Period | New/Renewal Request Due |
|---|---|
| January 1 - Dec 31 | December 1 |
| April 1 - March 31 | March 1 |
| July 1 - June 30 | June 1 |
| October 1 - September 31 | September 1 |
| System | Startup SUs | Educational SUs | Research SUs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lonestar6 | 500 | 500 | Up to 100,000 |
| Frontera | CPU: 5,000 GPU: 3,000 | See Frontera Allocations | See Frontera Allocations |
When applying for an allocation on an HPC or Visualization system, you will be asked to estimate the number of service units (SUs) you will require for the project. SUs are calculated based on the wall-clock time of your jobs (measured in hours) and the number of nodes, depending on the system, used to run a job. Each job run on the resource consumes the SUs allocated to a project.
All the TACC resources listed below calculate Service Units (SUs) in terms of node-hours. Specialty nodes, such as GPU's, may be charged an additional multiplier.
SUs charged = (Number of nodes) X (job wall-clock time) X (multiplier).
A resource justification document will be required when applying for resources. The document should be in PDF form and include a description of the research being conducted and how TACC computation resources will impact this research. It should also describe the scientific applications to be used, and an estimated plan or table justifying the number of node-hours being requested.
The TACC Resource Allocation System (TxRAS) is for researchers from UT Austin, UT System and TACC Partner Institutions to request allocations. ACCESS is for all other US academic researchers. To access Frontera, please read the Frontera Allocations Guidelines.
Mandatory Fields to Include in Your Submission
- Request Title
- Public Abstract
- Main Document: Lonestar6 (4 pages), Frontera (10 pages) including: scientific background, research objectives and specific questions to be pursued, resource usage plan to achieve the research objectives, justification of the allocation amounts for all resources and resource types (scaling information to support the calculation of the resource request), and access to other computational resources and why those resources are not available or sufficient for the work proposed in this request
Startups projects: Summary of the proposed experiments (1 page maximum). Estimated resources required (include a short justification of the number and type of nodes you will request, as well as any storage requirements). (1 page maximum) List any sources of funding (or pending funding) that support the proposed research, including funding agency and grant name(s) (Startup Allocations may be for unfunded exploratory research)
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