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1.4 Allocation Policies

1.4.1 HPC Cluster Allocation Policy

  1. CHPC HPC clusters are available to qualified faculty and students (under faculty supervision). To request access to CHPC computer systems submit an online request. The general nodes of the Notchpeak and Granite clusters are allocated by the process described below.  Users can however, run freecycle on these clusters if they do not get or have consumed their allocation.  Freecycle runs are subject to being preempted by jobs with allocation. Users can also run without allocation as owner-guest on the owner nodes on Granite, Notchpeak, Kingspeak and Lonepeak, again subject to the jobs being preemptable. Additionally, general nodes on Kingspeak and Lonepeak do not have allocation; instead they are run in a "Fair Share" mode to balance usage between groups. There is no preemption on these resources.

  2. Requesting allocations:
    All requests must be submitted by faculty with sponsored research projects (or their assigned delegate). CHPC uses core wall clock hour as the metric on the computational clusters.

     Node description  Charge (wallclock hours*number of cores) 
       1 Notchpeak node (32 cores per node) for 1 hour  32 hours (1.0 * 32 cores)
    1 Notchpeak node (40 cores per node) for 1 hour 40 hours (1.0 * 40 cores)
    1 Notchpeak node (64 cores per node) for 1 hour 64 hours (1.0 * 64 cores)

  3. Research groups requiring priority time on a given cluster must submit a proposal requesting up to 4 quarters at a time and will be due the first day of September, December, March and June for allocations beginning the following quarter:

       Quarter         Quarter Definition      Approximate Request Due Date
     Winter  January 1 - March 31 December 1
     Spring  April 1 - June 30 March 1
     Summer  July 1 - September 30 June 1
     Fall  October 1 - December 31 September 1

    The request must be made by the principal investigator of the sponsored research project, who must be a faculty member, or a designated delegate.

  4. Allocation requests are separated between requests for up to 30,000 CPU core hours and/or 300 GPU hours (small allocation request) and requests for more than 30,000 CPU core hours and/or 300 GPU hours (regular allocation request). All fields in the allocation request form are needed for the regular allocation request, the small request requires only a Title, Abstract, sources of funding, and Publications resulting from the use of CHPC resources.

  5. Small allocation proposals are reviewed by CHPC staff and granted immediately for up to four requested quarters, plus the current quarter.
  6. Regular allocation proposals are evaluated by the CHPC Allocation Committee on a quarterly basis. The committee will meet during the month prior to allocation period, to consider allocations for the following quarter. Before each meeting, CHPC will provide an estimate of the resources available for allocation in the four upcoming quarters as well as any other technical information the committee may deem appropriate. 
  7. The maximum award is 300,000 CPU core hours and/or 3000 GPU hours per quarter.
  8. Unused Allocations: Allocations unused in any quarter cannot be carried over to the next.
  9. Users without allocation and those whose usage exceeds their groups allocation will run in the system in "freecycle" mode, running at lowest priority and depending on the individual cluster policies, may be eligible for pre-emption. See Policy 2.1 General HPC Cluster Policies to see the individual cluster policies.]

1.4.2 Virtual Machine Allocation Policy

CHPC can provision virtual machines for sponsored research projects when the application or tools required do not fit with our other HPC resources (i.e. computation clusters). Please note that CHPC is now charging for virtual machines. For current pricing structure, see this page. To request a virtual machine for these purposes, please send the request via an email to helpdesk@chpc.utah.edu.  The request must come from, or be approved by a PI who has been setup as a CHPC PI. Please provide the following information :

  • A project name and brief description of your research. Please include sources of funding, including funding agency, grant/contract numbers.
  • Operating System - must be one of the following
    • Currently supported versions of Red Hat Enterprise (currently RHEL 8 and 9)
    • Currently supported versions of Windows Server (currently 2022 unless a different version is required)
    • Other (Please provide a detailed justification why your application cannot use one of the above operating systems)
  • Number of blocks; see pricing page. 
  • The desired IP name for the host
  • The requested security model for this host. Choices are:
    • CHPC Administered
    • Self Administered (NOT an option for virtual machines with personal health information (PHI) data.)
    • Shared Administration (please provide justification for this choice).
  • Name of the administrator of this VM
  • Detail the security requirements of this host including if there will be any personal health information (PHI) data involved in the project. If there is PHI, additional information such as Institutional Review Board (IRB) documents and software descriptions will be required. VMs provisioned for projects using PHI data will be provisioned in the Protected Environment and will require users be HIPAA trained in addition to meeting the standards for running in the CHPC Protected environment.
  • The completion of a Faculty Resource User Agreement (FRUA) is required.

For more details, see our 2.5 Virtual Machine Policies

1.4.3 Allocation Committee

Please see the CHPC's governance information for details about the Allocation Committee.

Last Updated: 6/11/25