Budget use clarification

[EmmaHoward]

Dear NCAS help desk,

I've been granted a proportion of my research project's mAU allocation to run some WRF experiments on Archer. I'm currently planning how I'll use my allocation, as I'd like to make it go as far as I can.

I'm not sure if I should do my post-processing on the DAC or on my university's local cluster. I'm a bit confused by whether serial jobs run on the login nodes and on the DAC come out of the budget or not. I know that they won't use anywhere near as many core hours as the model runs, but they could still add up if I'm not careful.

I tried running some post-processings job yesterday on the login nodes, that took about 5 hours. When I look on the user job report, its says that these jobs used about 0.07 kAU each, but were charged 0. Does this mean I don't need to worry about the budget these sorts of jobs use? What about if I did something similar on the DAC?

Thanks for your help,
Emma

[willie]

Hi Emma,

Only parallel jobs on the compute nodes accrue a cost from your budget. Jobs running on the serial nodes or on the Data Analytic Cluster are 'free' although they use CPU hours.

Willie

[EmmaHoward]

Great, thanks!