Limiting charges with budgets

OSC offers the use of budgets to limit the amount of charges incurred on projects.

Active budget

Once a budget has been approved, it (and the project it was requested from) becomes active. Having an active project allows users on that project to submit batch jobs to use OSC resources.

Using a budget

As usage is accrued on a project, the remaining budget value seen on the project details page will decrease. Once the value of the remaining budget is zero or less, then the project will be restricted and that project can longer be used to submit batch jobs for OSC resources.

Project storage also reduces the remaining budget daily. Project storage is any amount of storage requested by the PI or project admin and is located in either /fs/project or /fs/ess directories.

Home directory locations in /users and scratch locations in /fs/scratch do not count as project storage and are free.

Budgets are a Soft limit

A budget is not going to limit incurred charges to exactly the amount set. Depending on the situation, it could be over by a certain amount. If there are questions/concerns with a budget not correctly limiting charges at OSC, please contact OSC Help.

Once per day operations

The remaing budget amount is not a real-time representation. Completed jobs are uploaded to the client portal once per day. If one looked at their remaining budget and saw $5 was left, but a job that was completed and not yet uploaded to client used $4 worth of resources, then the actual remaining budget should be $1. The same goes for jobs which are still running, except it is unknown how much a running job will reduce the remaining budget by.

Shortly after job records are uploaded to client portal, this adjusts each projects remaining balance based on usage. At this time, if a remaining budget was zero or less, then the project will become restricted and no more jobs can be submitted using that project code.

If a job was already queued or running, before the project became restricted, then this project can still run and use OSC resources. Remember, a restricted project can only stop submission of jobs.

Storage charges

The charges incurred by project storage are not affected by a project becoming restricted.

To stop incurring charges due to project storage, immediately contact OSC Help.