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Accounting Groups

This section covers some common issues about Accounting Groups

What is an Accounting Group

All activity in the batch system is charged to Accounting Groups. This means that quota is assigned to them, that quota affects their priority, and all time/resources used are accounted to the groups. Most users are assigned automatically to Accounting Groups by virtue of experiment membership. However, some are not, and some people have multiple accounting groups. This should cover some of these cases.

Note that Accounting Groups are hierarchical. The dot in the name represents a level in the hierarchy.

How to check

[bejones@lxplus714 ~]$ haggis rights
+--------------------------+
|         bejones          |
+--------------------------+
| group_u_DTEAM.grid_DTEAM |
| group_u_DTEAM.grid_OPS   |
| group_u_IT.u_c3          |
+--------------------------+
[bejones@lxplus714 ~]$ haggis rights cmsprod
+------------------------+
|        cmsprod         |
+------------------------+
| group_u_CMS.u_zh.users |
+------------------------+

How to check what Accounting Group a job has

[bejones@aiadm00 condor]$ condor_q 7310179.0 -af AccountingGroup
group_u_DTEAM.grid_DTEAM.bejones

What happens if my Accouning Group is DEFAULT

The top level Accounting Group group_u_DEFAULT indicates that there isn't a mapping. There should be a warning when you submit a job to warn you. The issue with having group_u_DEFAULT is that you will have very little quota assigned, and it will take a long time for your jobs to be scheduled.

If you do have this as your Accounting Group, there are several possible avenues to fix it. If you are associated with an experiment, you should talk to your compute/resource coordinators to see if there is a group that you should be a member of. There are things such as "Compute Groups" that are often associated with experiments. If you're in doubt, please submit a SNOW ticket to the Batch team, and we will be able to investigate for you.

If I'm a member of multiple Accounting Groups?

If you're a member of multiple accounting groups, then you should try to ensure that you specify which group you wish to use for a specific activity. The system will otherwise assign you to one, but it may not be the one that you expect (normally we try the most "specific").

The syntax in the Submit file is:

+AccountingGroup = "group_u_THIS.is_an.example"

Last update: December 1, 2020