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ARCC operates its HPC clusters via an investment model: a UW researcher may invest into compute nodes on the ARCC HPC clusters by funding their purchase. This gives them priority access to those specific nodes, meaning that any jobs running on the investment nodes at the time of request by the investor, will be killed in order to give the investor access. ARCC owns those nodes. Investment buys priority access, not ownership, for the investor. The cost of nodes is based on current market conditions and is shown in this regularly updated page: Node Purchase Estimates .
General (non-investment) cluster usage is free for UW faculty, staff and students within an approved UW research project. If a general-user job lands on an investor’s node, it can be pre-empted (killed) when the investor requests access. Checkpointing the jobs for the purpose of continuing computation on a different node is the responsibility of the users.
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