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Craig's grammar cleanup
If your firm or organization has a paid contract with ACENET for compute time on [[Siku]], then this page explains how your computing is measured
and tracked. Submitting and troubleshooting jobs is discussed [https://docs.computecanada.ca/wiki/Running_jobs elsewhere].
== Terminology ==
* "User", that's obvious. One person, one login name.
* "Account" is not the same as "user" in this context. Your firm or organization has a contract with ACENET (or you probably wouldn't be reading this.) On Siku, that contract is represented by an "account" with a name like "pd-abc-123".
* "QoS" stands for "Quality of Service", but it might be better to forget that expansion and instead think of a "QoS" as a software object which remembers how many CPU hours etc. an account is allowed to use, and how much has been used already. Each paid account is associated with its own QoS, and the QoS has the same name as the account, like "pd-abc-123".
* "Billing units" measure the use of the system. One CPU-minute is worth one billing unit; 4G of RAM for one minute is also worth one billing unit. A GPU-minute is worth 35 billing units. See below for a formula, and examples.
== What if I have more than one account or QoS? ==
A user typically only has access to one account and one QoS, and your jobs are automatically associated with that account and QoS. You could have more than one account if, for example, your firm made two separate contracts with ACENET for separate projects, and you are working on both. Or , or if you were a freelancer and working for two different firms with ACENET contracts. In that case it will be up to you to assign each job you submit to the correct QoS using the --qos= option to sbatch, salloc, or srun.
== Why the funny word, QoS? ==
You may well ask, "Why have QoSs at all, why not just use accounts?" That has to do with Slurm internals. We would like you to be able to think in terms of a "bank account" of computing time, but to implement that we had to use Slurm's QoS mechanism. If we were then to call a QoS a "bank account", when the term "account" in Slurm means something slightly different but closely related, that would cause great confusion if and when you ever have to consult the generic Slurm documentation at https://slurm.schedmd.com.