Regulations

Governing Structure

The HPC@RUB cluster Elysium is operated by the HPC team at IT.SERVICES.

The governing structure of HPC@RUB is defined in the Terms of Use.

The HPC Advisory Board consists of five elected RUB scientists and two IT.SERVICES employees.

The five members of the current HPC Advisory Board, elected on April 18 2024, are:

  • Prof. Ralf Drautz (speaker)
  • Prof. Jörg Behler
  • Prof. Sen Cheng
  • Prof. Markus Stricker
  • Prof. Andreas Vogel

FairShare

One of the main tasks of the HPC Advisory Board is to allocate a so-called FairShare of the HPC resources to Faculties, Research Centres, and Research Departments. Part of the FairShare is always reserved for scientists whose facility does not have its own allocated FairShare, so that the HPC resources are open to every scientist at RUB.

The FairShare is a percentage that determines how much of the resources is available to a given facility on average. A facility with a 10% FairShare can use 10% of the cluster 24/7 on average. If it uses less, others can make use of the free resources, and the priority of the facility to get the next job to run on the cluster will grow. If it uses more (because others don’t make full use of their FairShare), its priority will shrink accordingly. FairShare usage tracking decays over time, so that it is not possible to save up FairShare for nine months and then occupy the full cluster for a full month.

Within a given facility, all scientists that are HPC project managers share its FairShare. All HPC projects share the FairShare of their manager. Finally, all HPC users share the FairShare of their assigned project. This results in the FairShare tree that has become the standard way of managing HPC resources.

Project Management

HPC resources are managed based on projects to which individual users are assigned. The purpose of the projects is to keep an account of resource usage based on the FairShare of project managers within the FairShare of their facility.

Professors and group leaders can apply to become project managers; see the Terms of Use for details.

A project manager may apply for projects, and is responsible for compliance with all rules and regulations. Projects will be granted after a basic plausibility check; there is no review process, and access to resources is granted solely based on the FairShare principle, not based on competing project applications.

Users need to apply for access to the system, but access is only active if the user is currently assigned to at least one active project by a project manager.