ACCRE staff work with research groups to determine the best way for them to contribute to ACCRE and participate in this shared resource. Research groups have the option of buying hardware to contribute to the cluster by paying for the full cost of the hardware up front or leasing hardware by contributing one-third of the cost of the hardware per year. Support costs can also be paid upfront or yearly. Your contribution level, or fairshare, has some affect on how much of the cluster you can effectively use at any given time. Larger account fairshares, generally result in shorter average job wait times in the idle queue.

Please contact ACCRE Administration to determine the buy-in or lease arrangement which best meets the needs of your research group. You may also begin with a guest account, and in fact, most users begin their affiliation with ACCRE as guest users.

Guest accounts are available for two purposes: to allow users to "try out" the environment and to encourage use by research groups at Vanderbilt that have not previously used the ACCRE cluster. Therefore, guest access is granted for the lessor of 45 processing days (or 1,080 processing hours) or six months duration. When requesting an account, select Option 2 on the Request an Account page.

Guest accounts for staff, post-docs, students, and visiting scholars must be approved by a faculty member. Before applying for an account, please verify which faculty member will be willing to sponsor your account. We will contact this faculty member to accept sponsorship of this account. We will also inform them they will be added to the ACCRE "Announce" listserv (as will you when your account is opened) so they will also receive major news pertinent to their research group's use of the ACCRE facility. On campus guest user should also meet with our Education and Outreach Liaison Zhiao Shi before the account can be opened.

These accounts have a small fairshare allocation which is shared by all guest account users, with no guarantees of actual compute time or priority in the job execution queue. Most users, however, find this a highly effective way to begin using the cluster. Guest usage is reviewed on a quarterly basis.