2.2 Cost of resources and services

This page details the actual cost of HPC at the University of Wyoming.

Compute

• 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: https://arccwiki.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DOCUMENTAT/pages/1606352931 .

• 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.

Beartooth Compute Storage (Teton Creek)

• Home directory

  • Each user gets 25G at NO COST.

  • NO backups.

  • If a user would like to increase their home directory quota, we charge $100/ TB / year for any storage over 25G.

• Gscratch

  • Each user gets 5T at NO COST (Subject to purge policy).

  • NO backups.

  • If a user would like to increase their home directory quota, we charge $100/ TB / year for any storage over 5T.

• Project

  • Each project gets 1T at NO COST.

  • No Backups, but we do keep 20 days worth of snapshots to help recover from recent accidental data loss.

    • Users can apply for a one-time, no-cost capacity increase by providing written justification for the amount of extra storage and its benefit to the UW missions of research, education and economic development.

      • This capacity increase lasts for the life of the storage system (typically 3 years), the increase must be approved by ARCC Leadership, and is subject to a 10TB max limit.

    • For any other storage increases in the /project space, we charge $100/ TB / year.

    • Request a capacity increase

Long term storage

• Alcova

  • High-performance storage with easy access from Windows and Mac and data sharing capabilities via Globus Online.

  • FREE up to 500 GB.

  • $100 / TB / year, billed monthly based on usage over 500 GB; upfront payments are an option.

  • Long Term Storage on Alcova costs $750 per terabyte for 10 years, billed upfront based on the allocation.

  • Daily backups.

  • 20 days worth of snapshots will help recover from recent accidental data loss.

• Pathfinder

  • Slower storage, good for data that are not needed regularly.

  • One-time fee of $50 per Accesskey/Secretkey.

  • $45/ TB / year, billed monthly based on usage.

  • Daily backups (NOT by default, only if requested by user).

  • Web accessible - S3 protocol ONLY (not traditional use).

Network Resources Costs

• Investment model only - subject to discussion.

• Otherwise - no cost.

Software Resources Costs

ARCC provides the following at NO COST to the UW researchers, staff and students:

• Redhat OS license,

• Intel Compiler,

• Slurm Job Scheduler,

• GLobus data transfer,

• anything additional has a cost that the PI is subject to pay.

Users

External collaborators have a 1 time fee (See IT web resources for more information).

Personnel Costs

• ARCC provides help to run HPC “best effort” at NO COST.

• Anything beyond the “basic use” may require a charge and would need to be discussed (i.e. a software engineer dedicated to your project).