Rates for Service

Poster Printing
Poster printing is currently billed at a rate of $40.00 a poster.

Biowolf

There are two options for using the Biowolf Compute Cluster.

One: Regular Usage Rates

Use of the biowolf cluster can be billed at a rate of $0.10/CPU-hour. The total charge is based on the amount of time that a process occupies a CPU slot, not on the actual CPU usage.

Under this structure, a job that runs for 24 hours on four CPUs will be charged:



24 hours * 4 CPUs * $0.10/CPU-hour = $9.60


Usage of the biowolf cluster can be billed on a monthly basis.


Two: Extended Usage Rates


Extended usage rates are available for labs expecting to need large amounts of computer time.  For the equivalent of approximately two weeks of usage of the full 256-CPU cluster($8,000), access to a set of low-priority queues will be given to all members of the lab for one year.  Cluster usage will be checked quarterly during the year.  The first four weeks full cluster usage (172,032 CPU-hours) will not be charged for.  Usage in excess of this amount will be billed at a rate of $0.05/CPU-hour.  The initial allocation is based on CPU-hours used and can be viewed as either the full 256-CPU cluster for two weeks or use of 20 CPUs for an entire year.


Under the current scheduling system, a low-priority job will be able to use any computer time left by the higher-priority jobs.  The effect of this varies with the job mix being run:


    

  • If there is no high-priority job running on the same nodes as the low-priority job, then the low-priority job receives all the CPU time.
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  • If a high-priority job is running but is not CPU-bound (e.g., a blast job that is limited by database accesses), the low-priority job will receive the unused computer time.  Disk-bound jobs often use less than half of the CPU.
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  • If a high-priority job is running and is CPU-bound (e.g., a Gaussian or GAMESS calculation), the low-priority job will receive little time.  Note that even molecular-modeling programs spend a substantial portion of their time in disk-bound activities.
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Job priorities can be adjusted for deadline projects and the lab will be guaranteed at least four weeks of cluster time over the course of the year.


Virus Removal


A fee for virus removal and system rebuilds may be charged under the Desktop Support guidelines if the system has not been kept current with both anti-virus and Windows updates.  The fee for this service is a flat rate of $70.00 per instance, comparable to the rate charged by IT User Services.


The CAVE


Usage of the Visualization Studio (the CAVE) will be charged at a rate of $20.00/hour. This is a flat-rate fee that covers the use of the SGI Prism, the Windows PC, and the projectors.