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Refunds

In general, the CTC allows refunds for significant amounts of service units lost due to conditions beyond the control of the user. One way that the CTC encourages users to control this loss is by promoting checkpointing.

The CTC allows refunds of wallclock hours charged under the following circumstances:
 
  • For wallclock hours lost when the system is brought down by the operator (scheduled or unscheduled). (NOTE: When a system crash occurs (as opposed to a "graceful" shutdown), any wallclock hours accumulated for that session are not charged to you, so no request for refund is necessary.)
  • For hours lost due to malfunction of system hardware.
  • In some cases, for resources lost due to a major system software bug.
Refunds are subject to the following conditions:
  • The amount requested is greater than or equal to one wallclock hour.
  • You either checkpointed the job, or indicate that the nature of the application precludes checkpointing. The request is made within 3 weeks of when the job was run.
Procedure

To request a refund, please send email to useracct@tc.cornell.edu with the following information:
  • A description indicating the circumstances that caused you to lose wallclock hours, including the total number of hours you are requesting be refunded. If a downtime caused the loss, please indicate the date and time. Indicate whether or not you checkpointed. If you did not checkpoint and want a refund, you must state that it is not feasible for you to checkpoint and explain why.
    With checkpointed jobs, be sure to indicate the units lost since the last checkpoint, not the total for the job.
  • All available console logs pertinent to the request.
  • You will be notified by electronic mail as to the action on your request. Normally, this will take about 2 weeks.

A user who makes repeated requests for refunds may be contacted by a CTC consultant to see if we can help improve the degree of checkpointing in his/her program.
 
Questions about refunds

If you have any questions about requesting a refund, please send them to useracct@tc.cornell.edu, or call the User Accounting group at the Cornell Theory Center at 607-254-8694.

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