Cost Center
Intent
The Cost Center provides researchers the ability to purchase computational or storage resources beyond what ARC provides for free, intended for computational “bursts” to meet conference deadlines, or short-term storage of large datasets. It provides:
Compute or storage beyond the free tier
High priority quality of service (QOS) for faster job execution
PI-specified sub-account limits
Requestable through 4help
The program is also intended to provide the accounting infrastructure to allow PIs to include access to resources in grant proposals and contracts.
Alternatively, if you would like to get access to dedicated computational resources or long-term expansion of storage, you may want to instead consider the Investment Program.
Free Tier
ARC is working to decrease HPC cost, improve access, services and augment VT’s research and teaching missions. We are realigning ARC to more naturally support research groups. ARC provides the following resources for each PI free of charge:
Category |
User |
PI (project allocation) |
|---|---|---|
240 SUs/month for the first 3 months |
1,000,000 SUs/month |
|
640 GB |
– |
|
– |
50 TB |
A service unit (SU) resembles usage of a trackable hardware resource for a specified amount of time. The SU charge rate can vary based on the specific hardware used. The default rate is 1 SU per core-hour. Resources like GPUs and memory incur additional SU charges.
When a user creates an account on the cluster they automatically obtain a limited number of 240 SUs on their personal allocation to test their workflows during their first 90 days. Users need to be added to a PI’s project allocation to utilize their 1,000,000 monthly SU allowance.
PIs can create multiple projects and allocations on ColdFront to divide their compute and storage allowance. This is beneficial when the PI wants to control how much compute and storage their students get on each projects.
Allocations can also be submitted for teaching needs; these are owned by ARC and not billed toward a PI’s account.
Note
Jobs submitted to preemptable partitions do not count against the above user/project limits.
Job Priority
Priority determines position of your job in the queue:
Quality of Service (QoS) |
Available by/through: |
|---|---|
priority (high) |
paid allocations via cost-center |
normal (default) |
normal |
Cost Structure
As a service center, the fee structure is subject to annual review from central VT accounting.
Compute: PIs may acquire compute hours - Service Units (SU) - at a rate of $0.01 per SU which is equivalent to one core-hour. PIs will own a paid allocation that will be tracked separately from the free tier. PIs will be billed on a monthly basis based on the utilization of SUs. Job submitted via a paid allocation will also benefit from a higher priority in the scheduler. To request a paid allocation with higher priority submit a ticket on 4help.
Projects storage: Expansion of /projects storage can be requested via 4help. Current billing rates is $90 per TB of capacity per year with a minimum expansion size of 25TB and minimum term of two years.
Archive storage: Long-term archive storage can be requested via 4help. Archive storage is managed by ARC staff. Current billing rates is $100 per TB of capacity per year with a minimum expansion size of 25TB and minimum term of four years.