Cost Center

Intent

The Cost Center provides researchers the ability to purchase computational or storage resources beyond what ARC provides for free. It can be requested via 4help. It provides:

  • Compute or storage beyond the free tier

  • High priority quality of service (QOS) for faster job execution

  • PI-specified sub-account limits

The cost center also aims to provide budget estimates that enable PIs to incorporate computing resources into grant proposals or contracts.

Free Tier

ARC provides a substantial amount of computing and storage resources at no cost through project allocations managed by a PI.

Each PI receives:

  • 2,000,000 Service Units (SUs) per month for compute.

  • 50 TB of project storage shared across the PI’s project allocations.

Each new user also receives:

  • 240 Service Units (SUs) on a personal allocation during their first 90 days to test and validate workflows before joining a research project.

  • 640 GB of home directory storage.

A Service Unit (SU) is a measure of compute resource consumption. The default charge rate is 1 SU per CPU core-hour, although the actual rate varies depending on the hardware used. Resources such as GPUs and memory incur additional SU charges based on the selected hardware.

After the initial 90-day trial period, users perform research by being added to one or more PI-managed project allocations, allowing them to share the PI’s monthly compute allocation.

PIs can create multiple projects and allocations through ColdFront to organize research activities and distribute compute and storage resources among research groups, collaborators, or individual projects.

Teaching allocations are also available. These allocations are managed by ARC to support instructional activities and are not charged against a PI’s research allocation.

Note

Jobs submitted to preemptable partitions do not count against the above user/project limits.

PIs can monitor the utilization of their accounts by running the getusage command

  getusage --account <slurm_account_name>
  getusage --pid <VTPIDpid> (PID of the VT PI)

Job Priority

Priority determines the 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. Jobs 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 rate is $90 per TB of capacity per year with a minimum expansion size of 10TB and minimum term of one year. Due to the huge size of the file system (10PB) the storage is not backed up. If you would like your data to be backed up you may purchase back up storage.

Archive or back up storage: Long-term archive and back up storage can be requested via 4help. Archive and back up storage is managed by ARC staff. Current billing rates are $112 per TB of capacity per year with a minimum expansion size of 5TB and minimum term of four years.