Requesting Education Allocations for use in Teaching Courses

Owned by Kuhl, Spencer
Last updated: Nov 02, 2017
2 min read

In order to access Bridges for classroom use, as an educator you must write a short proposal for educational allocation credits and submit it to XSEDE.  This document contains step-by-step instructions in how to do so.

For more information see the XSEDE webpage describing this process in detail.


Education allocations last one year, and a Principal Investigator (PI) may request separate Educational projects for courses happening at the same time. You can renew an Educational project for the same course in subsequent academic year.  This means that if you have several courses active that utilize an XSEDE resource, you must write an allocation request for each academic course.

To submit an Education Allocation request, the following resources must be included:

  • Project Abstract: Typically this is the description from the university course catalog.
  • CVs: Education requests require a curriculum vitae (CV) for the PI and for any listed co-PI. CVs should be in standard, two-page NSF or NIH format.
  • Syllabus: Education requests also require a syllabus to be uploaded in the Documents section. The syllabus should outline the topics to be covered in the course.
  • Resource Justification: The Resource Justification should estimate the resource need based on the amount of work students will perform in the course. The request should indicate the number of students and describe the computational resource requirements for each course project. This information should be used to calculate approximate resource needs for the class as a whole.

If you wish, you may contact ITS Research Services to review your allocation proposal before submission.


Be sure to include in your request specific times that you require the resource to be available.  An example of this would be during class time or a three to four hour block before homework is due.  Please do not request 'all week or all day' for a reservation, XSEDE computing resources are highly subscribed and they will not accommodate such long reservation requests. Keep in mind that you and your students will be put into an access queue during any other time, typically wait times are from a few seconds to a few minutes, but can extend into several minutes to an hour, so plan accordingly.



Finally, submit your request to XSEDE through this link.

Allocations requests are typically awarded within two weeks, often times much sooner.


If you are running out of allocations during the course of your class, you can request supplementation credits.

One would submit a supplement request for additional SUs. To begin the supplement process, login to the XSEDE portal at portal.xsede.org and click on "Submit/Review Request" under the "Allocations" tab. The next screen will display the approved allocation with the action for "Supplement".   Once the supplement is submitted, it will be reviewed by site representatives and a separate notification will be sent once it is reviewed.