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 the IT Service Catalog > Software & Computing Devices > Enhanced ARC HPC Access
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 |
800,000 core-hours/month (TinkerCliffs only) |
640 GB |
– |
|
– |
50 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 subject to annual review from central VT accounting. The rates for FY24 are established as follows:
Resource type |
Cost |
|---|---|
CPU-based compute |
estimated: $0.010 / core-hour |
GPU-based compute |
estimated: $1.1320 / GPU-hour |
Storage and other available resources
Long-term expansion of /project storage can be requested via the Investment Computing program. Current billing rates range from $60 - $100 per TB of capacity per year with a minimum expansion size of 25TB and minimum term of two years.