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Refund Policy

UPDATE: 1/28/00

Refund requests will be denied on the Origin because of lost output 
for batch jobs not using the msscmd -b/-B options. 

Policy for granting or denying a refund request
===============================================

A refund request will be considered when one of the following
is true:  
	1. Output was lost because of a system crash.
	2. A bug in system software/hardware caused incorrect
	   output. 
	3. NCSA staff gave misleading advice, causing
	   incorrect output. 

Refund requests will be denied when one of the following is
true: 
	1. Less than 50 Service Units (SU) were consumed 
           (academic users only).
	2. The request was made more than two weeks after the
	   charge.  
	3. No charges were recorded for the job in question.
	   (If the system crashes before a job finishes, the
	   CPU usage will not be recorded in the accounting
	   file.)
	4. On the Origin, because of lost output for batch jobs 
           not using the machine-local scratch filesystem. (For 
           example, a job that runs on machine hod1 but uses 
           /scratch-modi4 for its I/O, and fails 
	   because of a problem on /scratch-modi4.)
        5. On the Origin, because of lost output for batch jobs
           not using the msscmd -b/-B options. 

NOTE: Refunds are processed automatically for charges (larger than 
mimimums listed above) incurred by jobs killed due to a system crash.

Procedure for handling refund requests
--------------------------------------
The user makes the request to the consulting staff
(academic users contact the National Consulting Office,
industrial users contact their assigned consultant).
The user should provide as much information as possible.
The table below lists the minimum information required.
Additional information may include error messages displayed
or a copy of the batch script used. 
	User ID			Reason for the request
	Machine			lsbatch request ID	
	Date that the job finished	
The consultant will determine the amount of the refund and
a decision will be made as to whether the refund will be
granted.   The user and User Administration will then be
notified of any changes that need to be made in the
accounting records.
If you have any questions regarding this policy, please
contact the National Consulting Office via e-mail at
consult@ncsa.uiuc.edu or by phone at 217-244-1144. 

Silicon Graphics Origin2000:usr/news/Refund_Policy
Last Modified: January 28, 2000