Research Computing - What is the condominium model?

Condominium clusters have become the standard for central campus high performance computing resources. In this model the cost of the cluster is shared between the university and researchers. The primary responsibility of the researchers in this model is to provide funding for computational resources, which are then placed into the central cluster. Scheduling software then allows these resources to be shared with other university members when they are not in use by the contributing researchers. To provide a viable computing environment for a large research university it is important to balance the goals of making usage, especially for students, as friction-free as possible while providing a level of service to contributing researchers to make inclusion in a central cluster a value-added proposition.