Cost Center

Intent

The Cost Center provides researchers the ability to purchase computational or storage resources beyond what we provide in the subsidized base tier at no cost. It can be requested via 4help. It provides:

  • Compute or storage beyond the subsidized base tier at no cost

  • 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.

Subsidized Base Tier

ARC provides a substantial amount of computing and storage resources at no cost (subsidized by the University) 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:

  • 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 cost structure is determined by the University Controller’s Office. To request a service, submit a ticket on 4help.

Compute: PIs may acquire CPU compute hours at a rate of $0.0099 per core-hour. PIs may acquire GPU compute hours at a rate of $1.1320 per gpu-hour. PIs will own a paid allocation that will be tracked separately from the subsidized base tier. PIs will be billed on a monthly basis based on actual utilization. Jobs submitted via a paid allocation will also benefit from a higher priority in the scheduler.

Projects storage: PIs may acquire additional storage at a rate of $7.5652 per TB per month.

Archive or backup storage: PIs may acquire long-term archive and backup storage managed by ARC staff. Rate is $8.3975 per TB per month.

Consulting: PIs may acquire consulting time with our team to dive in a research project with special needs. Rate is $85.0751 per hour.