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) |
640 GB |
– |
|
1 TB |
– |
|
– |
25 TB |
|
/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.