BioHPC Credit Accounts, Costs and Charging
Maintaining a large pool of workstations along with the
software and access infrastructure takes a lot of time and effort.
Machines gradually age and need to be replaced. Therefore Bioinformatics
Facility has to recover its BioHPC Cloud investment by charging users for
access. Every BioHPC Cloud user must have access to (or be an owner of) a
BioHPC credit account with Compute Units available to be used.
Any user can set up a BioHPC credit account (using "My
Accounts" page), but we strongly recommend that all users from
the same research group use one BioHPC credit account created and
maintained by a designated group member, the BioHPC credit account owner
can add/remove users as needed. Each BioHPC credit account must be
credited with Compute Units, it can be done by selecting "Purchase Compute
Units" link on "My BioHPC Credit Accounts" page, the units can be
purchased with a Cornell account, a PO, or a credit card. Compute
Units can be exchanged for reservations on BioHPC machines; the amount of
time per Compute Unit depends on the type of machine. Current pricing and
exchange rates are listed on this page.
Reserving time
In order to reserve workstation time, a user needs to
have access to a BioHPC credit account with sufficient amount of Compute
Units. A user may belong to more than one BioHPC credit account, and then
the user can select the appropriate account to apply when making a
reservation. Only the hours actually used are charged, if a user cancels
or shortens the reservation only the hours that have been used will be
subtracted from the BioHPC credit account. However, available hours are
computed with all the reserved time included to prevent overbooking. NOTE:
"time used" is defined as the wall clock time elapsed when your
reservation is active - it has nothing to do with how much you actually
used the CPU/RAM etc during this time. "Time used" reflects the span for
which you had the workstation reserved.
There are different types of BioHPC machines - e.g.
general workstations, medium memory workstations, large memory
workstations. Cost of time for different workstation types is different,
but any BioHPC credit account can be used with any machine type, just the
amount of 'available hours' listed on the reservation page will be
different. The conversion rates are listed on
pricing page and on lab credit account
management page, the latter also shows how many hours you have
available on each server type. It is possible to transfer units from one
credit account to another, provided that you are an owner of the source
account and you are allowed to use the target account. You can access this
transfer page from the bottom of "My Lab Credit Accounts" page or directly
here.
Types of credit accounts and BioSLURM cluster
There are two types of BioHPC Credit Accounts: "hours"
and "membership". The first type, "hours", allows users to
reserve workstations for as many hours as available on the account. The
second type, "membership" is a special account that enables users
to submit jobs to BioSLURM
cluster, as well as allows users to use continuously the types of
machines that belong to the given membership type with some limits, like
maximum total amount of hours reserved and maximum single reservation
length. The limits are 'rolling' which means that they have to be met an
any given time, but get updated over time. For example if you make the
maximum length reservation with a "membership" account now, you will be
able to extend it by one day tomorrow at the same time. See our pricing page for more details about available
membership accounts.
Each new research group may request an exploratory
BioHPC credit account with free 100 Compute Units, please contact us by
e-mail at
support@biohpc.cornell.edu for more details. This is one time credit
for a new PI only, not for each new project.