ACCRE is supported by use and support fees from its research groups. By default, new groups are added to ACCRE as a guest group at no cost to ensure that it meets their needs, and we will only ask you to move to a paid account after several months of sustained usage. Groups under the guest account have a maximum CPU limit of 16 cores.
All services are on a fiscal year commitment and billed monthly through iLab. Reduced rates for research groups are subsidized by VU and VUMC.
ACCRE uses a fairshare for group priority on the cluster. Fairshare refers ACCRE’s computational unit where 1 fairshare equals 1 CPU core on the cluster. The ACCRE cluster has approximately 16,000 cores. When groups are ready to move to a paid account, they have two options:
- Purchase hardware (node) to be added to the cluster, increasing the number of available cores on the cluster. The group will receive a fairshare for the total number of CPU cores on the purchased node. Ongoing support fees apply for the warranty life of the node.
- Rent cores out of the total pool of CPU cores on the cluster. The group will receive a fairshare for the total number of CPU cores rented.
Why Purchase vs. Rent (Service Use fee)?
If you are new to ACCRE, we recommend starting out with the service use fee. You can scale up or scale down the number of cores rented at any given time by opening a helpdesk ticket after you submit your initial fairshare service agreement. For groups with long standing projects, it is worth considering your break-even point (usually around year 2-3) to decide if purchasing a node is a better value for your research.
For more information on how to request paid services through the ACCRE core, please visit ACCRE Billing: Getting Started in iLab.
Pricing
| Category | Service | Price to Researcher | Unsubsidized Price | Additional Information |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cluster Support and Use Fees | Cluster Support Fee (purchase) | $480/node/year | $932/node/year | Node purchase required |
| Cluster Use Fee (rent) | $84/core/year | $88/core/year | Minimum 7-month commitment | |
| Cluster Filesystem | /data (nightly backup) | $180/TB/year | $187/TB/year | n/a |
| /nobackup (not backed up) | $108/TB/year | $111/TB/year | n/a | |
| AuriStor Filesystem (ACCREx) | /afs (nightly backup) | $60/TB/year | $60/TB/year | n/a |
| Custom Gateways | Basic | $840/server/year | $1630/server/year | Requires FAB approval |
| Intermediate | $960/server/year | $1863/server/year | Requires FAB approval | |
| Complex | $1080/server/year | $2096/server/year | Requires FAB approval | |
| Tape Backups | Internal Server | $180/TB/year | $415/TB/year | n/a |
| External Server | $240/TB/year | $573/TB/year | n/a | |
| SciLo (ACCREx) | SciLo Tape Storage | $49.98/TB/year | $49.98/TB/year | User-managed archive |
| Software Engineer Hours | Software Engineer For Hire Service | $42-62/hr | $42-62/hr | Prices vary year to year |
Cluster Support and Use Fees
Please contact us for pricing information on CPU and GPU node purchases. If you would like to rent cores, please visit iLab and Billing for additional information on requesting paid services.
AuriStor Filesystem
For more information about Auristor, please visit our documentation page.
Custom Gateways
Custom gateway requests must be made through ACCRE consultation. Please contact us to schedule a consultation meeting with ACCRE directors.
Tape Backups
For more information about Tape Backups, please visit our documentation page.
SciLo
For more information about SciLo, please visit our documentation page.