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AUs

Q: What is an AU and how is it calculated?
A: Budgets are expressed in Allocation Units (AUs). You can think of an AU as a unit of computational work, equivalent to a 1 Gflops processor running for 1 hour. The AU will be used through all three phases of the HPCx project.

Under Phase 2A:

• 1 CPU hour = 4.81445 AUs
• 1 AU = 0.20771 CPU hours

Using AUs enables us to have budgets and allocations which are independent of the processor we are using.

The amount of time used by a job, and deducted from the budget, is T * n * 4.81445 AUs, where T is the length of time that the job ran and n is the number of processors.

For example, consider a par128_12 job which runs for 10 hours. The time used is 10 * 128 * 4.81445 = 6162.496 AUs.

See services/policies/charging_model.html for more details.