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Request PATh Facility Credits

All compute time on the PATh Facility is charged using a credit system.

If you have not already applied for a credit allocation at the time of requesting an account, PATh staff can provide a small startup allocation for initial testing.

After start up testing, credits are granted from the NSF via the relevant program officer. This guide details the process and templates available to request credits.

Requirements

The opportunity to use PATh Facility resources is available to all PIs submitting, or having submitted, proposals to the following Programs as per the Dear Colleagues Letter.

How to Apply

The Dear Colleague Letter describes the request process. Researchers are asked to draft a credit request, and do one of the following:

  • New Proposals: Include the request for HTC resources as a Supplementary Document.
  • Existing Awards: Contact the NSF cognizant program officer of their project by e-mail, with the description of their HTC resource request. Please include "HTCAccess" and the award number for the funded project in the e-mail subject line.

Sample Credit Request

The credit request is described in the Dear Colleague letter and should include:

(1) the anticipated total HTC resources required, with yearly breakdown; and (2) a technical description and justification for the request. The latter should include information regarding (a) the expected number of self-contained tasks per ensemble ‒ note that each task can be packaged into one or more batch job(s); (b) the resource requirements for each task type in the ensemble ‒ for example, requirements for cores, memory, wall-time, and scratch space; (c) the expected number of ensembles; (d) the expected input and output data requirements for each task type; and (e) the expected number and size of shared input files within an ensemble – expected number of times each file is read per ensemble.

This should be no more than two pages. The Research Facilitation team has assembled a template credit request for you to use as a starting point, in this folder:

PATh Facility Allocation Templates

If you are not sure how many credits to request for your allocation, please do one or more of the following:

  • Request an account and startup allocation on the PATh Facility to run test jobs and determine resource needs and possible scale: Getting Started
  • Use the credit guide and worksheet linked below: PATh Facility Credit Guide
  • Contact the PATh Facility team at credit-accounts@path-cc.io

Program Officers

Requests can be submitted to the following program officers, based on domain:

More details can be found in the Dear Colleagues Letter provided by the NSF.

PATh Facility Credit Guide

For ease of calculating needed credits, the Research Facilitation team has provided an excel worksheet tha can be used to interactively view how many credits are needed for different job sizes. The spreadsheet is in this Google Drive folder:

PATh Facility Allocation Templates

Download and open the spreadsheet and then follow the instructions.

The current credit system is documented on this page: PATh Facility Credit Charges.