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Shareholder model

Introduction

The clusters operated and maintained by the ID SIS HPC group are based on a shareholder model and are therefore financed by their users. On each HPC cluster, there is a share financed by IT Services that is open to all members of ETH at no cost (the public share), while professors who have financed nodes in an HPC cluster receive a share of CPU time proportional to their investment. This is managed through batch system priorities: if a share is overused, its priority in the batch system decreases; if it is underused, the priority increases.

Note: Shares on different clusters are treated separately. That is, Euler shareholders who have not financed nodes in Leonhard do not automatically have shareholder privileges on Leonhard or any other HPC cluster.

Shareholders receive on average a guaranteed share of resources, proportional to their investment. Instead of physical resources (compute nodes), the shareholders buy an equivalent in CPU time.

Public share

Resources in the public share are not guaranteed. If the clusters are busy, jobs might have a longer waiting time in the queue. There are also certain limits in terms of maximum number of cores and maximal amount of memory that guest users can use at the same time. These limits might be subject to changes.

Becoming a shareholder

Professors, institutes or departments who would like to become shareholders of an HPC cluster can invest at any time. The official service description and the current price list are available in the IT service catalogue.