| Overview |
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The NIH through a Shared Instrumentation Grant funded the purchase of a large visualization/computation system. Additional funds were provided by the Supercomputing Institute through its Basic Sciences and Computing Laboratory. The visualization/computation system consists of a 16-processor SGI Onyx4, a 48-processor SGI Altix, and a large (4 ft by 6 ft) screen that has stereo viewing. The resources are available to all BSCL users with priority being given to NIH funded researchers. |
| Available Resources |
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A detailed list of the NIH priority hardware resources purchased with NIH funds can be found at www.msi.umn.edu/bscl/nih/hardware.html. A detailed list of all the available BSCL hardware can be found at www.msi.umn.edu/bscl/hardware. |
| NIH Priority Policy |
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Any researcher who is part of a group that has current NIH-sponsored funding will be given priority scheduling on the BSCL-NIH resources. Scheduling of batch jobs has been set up through the Maui scheduler to allow NIH sponsored researchers to receive the highest scheduling priority while the total cpu usage of the NIH sponsored researchers on the SGI Altix and SGI Onyx4 systems is less than 75%. When total cpu usage is more than 75% non-NIH researchers will receive a higher priority. If no NIH sponsored calculations are in the queue, non-NIH calculations will be scheduled regardless of the NIH total usage percentage, and vice-versa. Among the NIH sponsored groups a fairshare algorithm will be used to schedule jobs. Scheduling among the non-NIH groups will be done in a similar manner. A detailed description of the fairshare algorithm can be found at www.msi.umn.edu/bscl/nih/fairshare.html. |