Administrative

Usage Fees

A 4-tier User Access Fee Schedule has been established: Commercial, Principal Investigator Types 1 and 2, and Basic plans. Commercial users will pay a flat fee of $3,000 per project and will provide copies of software they wish to use along with proof of licensure. Proof of licensure for commercial users will be also required for any software already available on the HPC resource. Academic users who use the cluster on a regular basis, (termed here Principal Investigators (PIs)) will be divided into two types: Type 1 will pay a flat fee of $2,500 per year for a single project (Principal Investigator-Type 1); Type 2 will pay $2,000 per grant funded project for multiple projects (Principal Investigator-Type 2). Each PI will be expected to build appropriate usage fees into all grant/contract budgets. In the absence of grant funding, PIs departments will be asked to pay usage fees. The Basic Plan will be made available to occasional users. The Basic rate will be 10 cents per cpu hour. Management of a user’s plan will be tracked by the Maui scheduler which can be used to determine cpu-hour usage per job. The BSBC Lab Steering Group will retain the right to revise the fee schedule and usage plans as needed to provide adequate service levels to all participants and reach the goal of sustained maintenance funding.

The Basic Plan will provide the lowest priority cpu cycles. Commercial users will have a higher priority with the possibility of basic user jobs being checkpointed or suspended to provide required cpu cycles. PIs will have equal priority with commercial users on the HPC resource. The BSBC Lab Steering Group retains the right to modify queuing of jobs as needed and may take into consideration special circumstances for current PI and commercial users. The proposed plan is a hybrid of current plans at NC State University, Cambridge University U.K., University of Florida, and HPCVL Kingston Canada.

The HPC cluster will be configured to permit expansion and expansion will be encouraged. If a PI or Commercial User contributes additional cores for the HPC Cluster, these users will be given top priority for the first three years on the section of the cluster contributed. After this period, priorities will revert to that described above for the original cluster. In the event of cluster expansion, the BSBC Lab Steering Group will adjust usage fees to ensure that the usage fee account maintains an adequate balance to support new resources.