The HPC3 subcommittee of the RCIC advisory committee crafted the initial policy. The RCIC Advisory committee approved the policy

We don’t believe so. The “condo” conversion factor (0.95) essentially enables an owner to turn around and spend their converted hours on their owned hardware. The 5% reductions is a rational estimate of lack of availability of hardware when accounting for software maintenance, reboots, and other downtime. Grants should purchase the hardware capacity they require. Not more.

RCIC will allow you to set up “charge limits” for any particular user. If a student hits their limit, they ask you for more, or use the free queue.

Yes, if you are faculty member, you have granted cycles that are yours to use anyway you see fit for research. There is also the “free” queue, where jobs are not charged

We are actively working with UCI financial office to see if we can establish a rate that reduces the financial impact of overhead on recharged-cycles.

Yes. It is clear that substantial community of researchers requires this feature.

It really doesn’t, except that if a job is submitted requiring, say 16 core-weeks (16 cores for one week, 8 cores for two weeks)), the queueing system will not start the job unless there is enough credit to start the job (in this case, 2688 core hours)