The actual set of physical resources that an application is running on. There are two types of allocations: shared and exclusive.

• Exclusive allocation: jobs have dedicated physical resources (e.g., nodes, cores, memory). Multiple users cannot share a physical resource, and resources are not shared between jobs. This setup is common in HPC.
• Shared allocation: jobs share underlying physical resources (e.g., nodes, cores, memory). Multiple users can run on the same physical resources. This setup is common in cloud.

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Suggested Citation:

Converged Computing Authors. "Allocation." Converged Computing Community Space 05 Jul 2026, https://converged-computing.org/docs/allocation/ (accessed 05 Jul 26). [doi]