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MedicineBow Investments

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MedicineBow is ARCC's primary on-premises, cluster housed at the on-campus UW Information Technology Data Center in Laramie, WY. MedicineBow operates as a heterogeneous cluster implementing an institutional condo investment model. Researchers with sponsored projects can partner with ARCC to purchase equipment on Medicinebow at negotiated prices where they are given priority access.

Becoming an Investor

Ownership of Investment

ARCC retains ownership of the equipment through it's lifecycle. Equipment purchased through an investment entitles the investor to primary use by the investor for the full term as defined in a signed statement of work. The investment therefore buys the investor priority access to the associated hardware, however it does not buy ownership of the hardware itself unless otherwise specified in signed statement of work and invoice.

Investors are individual researchers or a group of researchers who work with ARCC to purchase computational resources such as nodes and/or storage on the Medicinebow cluster. The purchased resources are installed on the cluster, and then administered by ARCC's specialized staff. Typically, ARCC will provide environment infrastructure (i.e., racks, power, etc.) however there may be cases in which pricing is subject to the purchase of supporting equipment beyond the node or storage itself.

  • Investment Inquiries

    If you wish to look into purchasing equipment on the Medicinebow cluster please submit an investment inquiry request using the button below and fill out a request form on our service portal.

    You will be asked to provide contact information, hardware specifications, and anything else detailing your specific investment requirements. Once submitted, a member of the ARCC team will contact you to discuss details regarding the equipment requirements and purchase.

    Investment Inquiry Form

Advantages to Investing

  1. Access to the latest and greatest hardware: Provides a mechanism for researchers to incorporate new emerging architectures into the MedicineBow cluster to facilitate their specific area of research.
  2. Support and Maintenance is on us: ARCC staff provide service and maintainence for investment equipment over the life of the investment (typically, the full warranty period of the hardware). This means researchers are not responsible for personnel related to hardware support and/or maintenance.
  3. Priority Access: As an investor, you and your project members have preferred, on-demand access to any computing resources within your investment, and preemtive status.
    1. Furthermore, in efforts to prioritize access to funded research, jobs run within investment projects (where the-A projectname flag in the SLURM script directives or -salloc command is subject to an investment) have a higher prioritization in submitted job queues. To see investment prioritization, you may run: sacctmgr show qos.
    2. ALL members of investor associated projects recieve access hardware with investor priviledges.
    3. Priority access is granted as defined by the investor by project.
  4. Ability to Scale: As computational work scales beyond the original investment purchase, investors can run jobs spanning outside their initial investment to the rest of the resources available on the cluster - allowing investors to bypass limitations associated with purchasing specialized hardware on a local workstation.
  5. Efficient Resource Utilization: When investor-purchased resources are not in used by their investors, they are made available to the greater community of MedicineBow users. This arrangement is referred to as a backfill queue. Idle compute resources are made available for the standard user community through the backfill queue which includes all nodes on the system.

Distinguishing Access for Investors vs Standard Users

  • Investor Access

    As the investor, researchers may associate any MedicineBow cluster projects with their investment hardware. All members of those projects will have access to the investment. Investment access is thereby granted by project, not by user.

    • Investment members are provided with priority, on-demand access to purchased computational resources.
    • In efforts to prioritize access to funded research, jobs run by members of an investment project have a higher prioritization in respective queues.
    • To see investment prioritization, you may run: sacctmgr show qos.

  • Standard Access

    General cluster access granted to any MedicineBow users.

    Standard access is granted when someone has a MedicineBow account and that account is a member of an active MedicineBow project. This provides access to the cluster and all resources.

    • Standard access means you may be subject to wait times on your jobs.
    • This becomes more likely when requesting access to run on high-demand resources (these can include mass-memory nodes or nodes specifically produced for accelerated AI tasks )

The Condo Investment Model

The Medicinebow cluster uses a condo investment model to provide access to the cluster for research Faculty and PIs using two methods:

  1. Investor Access

  2. Standard Access

Resources purchased as an investment are installed in our cluster and administered by the ARCC system administrators. These resources are also collectively placed into their own partition as a condo investment partition.

When the investor-purchased resources are not in use by the investor or the investors project members, these resources will be made available to the overall cluster community of users. This type of arrangement is referred to as a backfill queue and the backfill queue is available for all cluster users including investors, and standard access users.

Access to investor-owned resources can be immediately revoked anytime the investors wishes to use their resources. Any jobs from the general community that happen to be running on investment nodes are automatically re-queued to facilitate the investors on-demand access to their hardware.

Standard users who want to prevent preemtion of their jobs should look into an investment, or utilizing a non-investor queue [^1]: MedicineBow non-investor-queues are queues on the cluster utilizing non-invested hardware, only. This means that jobs submitted to non-investor queues will not get preemted. Users wishing to get detailed cluster information about non-investor queues can use the command sinfo for more detailed information about queue utilization and availability.

MedicineBow is a Heterogeneous Cluster

See Medicinebow Hardware Specs

For a breakdown of the hardware and partitions available on the MedicineBow cluster, please see our MedicineBow Hardware Details page.

MedicineBow has been architected as a heterogenous cluster system.

This means that the MedicineBow system is comprised of several different node architectures/hardware types (which nodes with different processors, GPUs, memory, and interconnect specifications). The diverse collection of nodes are then incorporated ogether on one single system.

This allows MedicineBow to support diverse workloads and maximize performance by allowing researchers to tailor their workloads through the assignment of specific tasks to the most appropriate hardware partition(s). It also allows ARCC to facilitate the addition of emerging architectures to the cluster as they develop and are released.