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 its users. On each HPC cluster, there is a share financed by the IT Services is open to all members of ETH at no cost (public share), while professors who 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 is decreasing, whereas it is increasing when a share is underused.
NOTE: Shares on different clusters are treated separately, i.e., Euler shareholders who did not finance 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.
Resources in the public share are in contrary to shareholder resources 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 are subject to changes.
Professors, institutes or departments who would like to become shareholders of an HPC cluster have the possibility to invest at any time. The official service description and the current price list are available on the IT service catalogue.
