ACCESS AND ALLOCATION

STFC RESOURCE ALLOCATION COMMITTEE (RAC)

The Resource Allocation Committee (RAC) is responsible for overseeing the allocation process for all on DiRAC Resources, including compute time, storage and Research Engineering effort. DiRAC makes an annual Call for Proposals and the Resource Allocation Committee (RAC) was established by the STFC to oversee time allocation. The RAC has two sub-panels, one for Particle Physics & Nuclear Physics and one for Astronomy and Cosmology, each of which consider the proposals within their respective remits.

A RAC meeting with representatives from both sub-panels then determines the overall allocation of DiRAC time across the whole portfolio of proposals.

Title	Name	Host Institution
Prof	Robert Crain (Chair)	Liverpool John Moores University
Dr	Rowan Smith	University of Manchester
Dr	Heather Ratcliffe	University of Warwick
Dr	Rebecca Nealon	University of Warwick
Dr	Ingo Mueller-Wodarg	Imperial College London
Dr	James Wurster	University of St Andrews
Dr	Katy Clough	Oxford University
Dr	Dimitris Stamatellos	University of Central Lancashire
Dr	Payel Das	University of Surrey

Title	Name	Host Institution
Dr	Christopher Bouchard (Chair)	University of Glasgow
Prof	David Colling	Imperial College London
Dr	David Schaich	University of Liverpool
Prof	Jacek Dobaczewski	University of York
Prof	Maurizio Piai	University of Swansea
Dr	Antonin Portelli	University of Edinburgh

CALLS FOR PROPOSALS

Access to DiRAC is co-ordinated by The STFC’s DiRAC Resource Allocation Committee, which puts out an annual Call for Proposals to request time, a Director’s Discretionary Call, and operates a Seedcorn Time programme for small requests.

USER ACCOUNTS

Projects and accounts on DiRAC resources are administered through the DiRAC SAFE. SAFE stands for Service Administration From EPCC. It is a large web-based application, provided by EPCC for DiRAC. The same software is used by the Archer UK national supercomputing service and for other facilities at EPCC.

Every DiRAC user has an account on SAFE. You can use your SAFE account to check your use of CPU time and disk space now and in the past, to apply to join other projects and create service machine accounts, to change passwords, to keep your personal details up to date, to check the progress of the helpdesk queries you have submitted, and so on. PIs and project managers can do many other things. such as viewing usage by each member of their project team.

The DiRAC team also uses SAFE to administer the system and to generate reports. The helpdesk software is also part of SAFE. If you are a PI or project manager you can manage your project via SAFE.

You can find all the information you need on SAFE here. For any other information please email DiRAC Support.

A RAC meeting with representatives from both sub-panels then determines the overall allocation of DiRAC time across the whole portfolio of proposals.

PROJECT ALLOCATIONS

After each Call has been concluded, we publish the compute time allocated to each project, in terms of CPU-Mhours on the DiRAC service on which their calculations are to be run, as well as the Storage Space w[TB] allocated. In DiRAC we have three compute services and due to the different architectures on each service, the CPU-Mhours awarded to each project may not be directly comparable.

DiRAC serves more than 35 projects with over 400 active users. Our community is diverse and encompasses Particle Physics, Astrophysics, cosmology, solar system science and Nuclear Physics. Together their research addresses all the STFC Science Challenges. The featured photo in the header above shows the CSD3 Peta4 CPU/KNL cluster which provides our Data Intensive Cambridge Service.

After each Call has been concluded, we publish the compute time allocated to each project, in terms of CPU-Mhours on the DiRAC Resource on which the calculations are to be run, as well as the Storage Space [TB] allocated. In DiRAC we have three compute services based at four sites and due to the different architectures on each Service, the CPU-Mhours awarded to projects using different services may not be directly comparable.

DiRAC serves more than 35 projects with over 400 active users. Our community is diverse and encompasses Particle Physics, Astrophysics, cosmology, solar system science and Nuclear Physics. Together their research addresses all the STFC Science Challenges. The featured photo in the header above shows the CSD3 Peta4 CPU/KNL cluster which provides our Data Intensive Cambridge Service.