Cost Center

Intent

The Cost Center provides researchers or projects with the ability to purchase computational or storage resources beyond what ARC provides for free, for computational “bursts” to meet, e.g., conference deadlines, or short-term storage of large datasets. It provides:

  • Compute or storage beyond the free tier

  • Priority quality of service (QOS) for faster job execution

  • PI-specified sub-account limits

  • Requestable through ColdFront

The program is also intended to provide the accounting infrastructure to allow PIs to include access to resources in grant proposals and contracts.

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 to VT, improve access, services and augment VT’s research and teaching missions. As part of this, we are realigning ARC to more naturally support research groups (and class groups). Starting on TinkerCliffs, the Division of IT provides the following resources for each ARC user account free of charge:

Category

User

PI (project request)

Compute

240 core-hours/month

600,000 core-hours/month (TinkerCliffs only)

Home storage

640 GB

–

User workspace storage

1 TB

–

Project storage

–

25 TB

Archive storage

/vtarchive/home/pid

/vtarchive/groups/group

Allocations can also be submitted for class 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 in “line”:

Quality of Service (QoS)

Available by/through:

priority (high)

for-fee via cost-center

normal (default)

normal

Current Cost Structure

TinkerCliffs

The fee structure on TinkerCliffs is as follows:

Queue

Cost

normal_q

$0.0023 / core-hour

largemem_q

$0.01 / core-hour

intel_q

$0.0091 / core-hour

Storage and other available resources

Temporary expansion of /project storage can be requested. This will be billed at $2.1694 per TB per month.

For server hosting, enterprise backup or other needs, please send Terry Herdman an email.