Research Computing: patrons status
About Patrons Status
In the centrally-managed campus research computing environment, servers have been purchased both with central University funds and also with funds contributed by specific users' projects or departments. Researchers are encouraged to provide funding for the Research Computing team to purchase centrally-managed blade servers for their use. Purchased equipment is typically added to the central Research Computing cluster, Emerald. Researchers making such purchases are then given "patrons" group status in the LSF batch job management software with the allowable job slots equivalent to the number of CPU cores purchased. Any number of UNC faculty, staff, or graduate student Onyens can be added to the purchasing researcher's "patrons" group.
Advantages of Being a Patron
As a patron, you can always have access to resources when you need them. Research Computing purchases and owns the purchased servers, and also manages and houses the equipment in the ITS Manning data center. But the purchasing patron has first dibs on access to the servers, through the patrons queue, for a period of 3 years.
Patrons have priority use of the “patrons” LSF queue. Patron’s user jobs currently have no limits on time to execute. Rather than have resources sit idle when they are not in use by the purchasing patron, the purchased blade job slots are available to all other Emerald users for use via the “idle” queue. When patron-purchased hosts are idle, the “idle” queue dispatches jobs to those hosts. Jobs submitted to and running in the “idle” queue are preempted by “patrons” queue jobs, if necessary.
Additional Information
For further information on obtaining patron status contact Research Computing
Document Overview
Tags: LSF , patrons , queue , research computing , statistical computingSubjects: Advanced Computing
Audience: Everyone
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
