Partner Program
Mechanism for NC State units or individual faculty members to add compute resources to the HPC cluster to meet their HPC resource requirements.Compute nodes
Partners purchase compatible HPC compute nodes, and OIT houses the nodes in a secure campus data center with appropriate power, cooling, and networking. Partner nodes share software licenses and storage infrastructure with the other HPC cluster nodes.
A dedicated Slurm quality of service (QOS) is created for the partner, giving it top priority on the compute resources the partner added to the cluster. Partner jobs reach that hardware through the compute_partners and gpu_partners partitions, and the partner and any other Unity IDs the partner specifies have access to it. QOS limits are set based on what the partner needs. See Running Partner Jobs for how members of a partner project submit work.
In addition to the dedicated QOS, the partner project is granted an elevated share in Slurm's fair-share scheduling, weighted by the resources it contributed, so partner work also accumulates priority faster on the general partitions.
Compute resources not being actively used by the partner are made available to other NC State HPC projects for short duration jobs, and reclaimed as soon as the partner needs them.
Partner Advantages
The HPC compute node Partner Program offers compelling advantages for both the faculty partner and for the university.
Partner Advantages (services provided by university)
- secure space
- power (including UPS and diesel generator)
- cooling
- rack (including rack power distribution)
- network infrastructure (including message passing network for distributed memory nodes)
- system administration and maintenance
- priority access to additional compute resources
- access to shared storage and file systems
- access to university licensed software (compilers, debuggers, optimized math libraries, performance analyzers, ...)
- system and computational science support from HPC staff
University Advantages
- multiplies resources provided by university HPC investment
- increased HPC resource utilization yields more efficient use of university-wide research computing dollars
- scaling benefits reduce university-wide cost of HPC facilities (a few large power and cooling units vs. many small power and cooling units)
- scaling benefits reduce university-wide cost of HPC system support (incremental system administration and maintenance load for compatible hardware is very small - that is it takes nearly the same work to operate an 8-processor cluster as it does to operate a 100-processor cluster)