Billing policy¶

Running jobs on the compute nodes and storing data in storage space will consume the billing units allocated to your project:

Compute is billed in units of CPU-core-hours for CPU nodes and GPU-hours for GPU nodes.
Storage space is billed in units of TB-hours.

How to check your billing units¶

In order to check how many billing units you have used, you can use the following command:

lumi-allocations

It will report the CPU and GPU-hours allocated and consumed for all the project you are a part of. The tool also reports the storage billing units.

A description of how the jobs are billed is provided in the next sections.

Compute billing¶

Compute is billed whenever you submit a job to the Slurm job scheduler.

CPU billing¶

For CPU compute, your project is allocated CPU-core-hours that are consumed when running jobs on the CPU nodes. The CPU-core-hours are billed as:

cpu-core-hours-billed = cpu-cores-allocated x runtime-of-job

For example, allocating 32 CPU cores in a job running for 2 hours consumes:

32 CPU-cores x 2 hours = 64 CPU-core-hours

Slurm partition billing details¶

For some Slurm partitions special billing rules apply.

Standard and bench Slurm partitions¶

The standard and bench Slurm partitions are operated in exclusive mode: the entire node will always be allocated. Thus, 128 CPU-core-hours are billed for every allocated node and per hour even if your job has requested less than 128 cores per node.

For example, allocating 16 nodes in a job running for 12 hours consumes:

16 nodes x 128 CPU-cores/node x 12 hours = 24576 CPU-core-hours

Small Slurm partition¶

When using the small Slurm partition you are billed per allocated core. However, if you are above a certain threshold of memory allocated per core, i.e. you use the high memory nodes in LUMI-C, you are billed per slice of 2GB memory (which is still billed in units of CPU-core-hours). Specifically, the formula that is used for billing is:

CPU-core-hours-billed = max(
  CPU-cores-allocated, ceil(memory-allocated / 2GB)
  ) x runtime-of-job

Thus,

if you use 2GB or less of memory per core, you are charged per allocated cores.
if you use more than 2GB of memory per core, you are charged per 2GB slice of memory.

For example, allocating 4 CPU-cores and 4GB of memory in a job running for 1 day consumes:

4 CPU-cores x 24 hours = 96 CPU-core-hours

Allocating 4 CPU-cores and 32GB of memory in a job running for 1 day consumes:

(32GB / 2GB) CPU-cores x 24 hours = 384 CPU-core-hours

Storage billing¶

For storage, your project is allocated TB-hours. Storage is billed whenever you store data in your project folders. Storage is billed by volume used over time. The billing units are TB-hours.

The amount of TB-hours billed depends on the type of storage you are using. See the data storage options page for an overview of the type of storage used in the different storage options.

Main storage (LUMI-P) billing¶

The main storage backed by LUMI-P is billed directly as:

TB-hours-billed = storage-volume x time-used

For example, storing 1.2 TB data for 4 days consumes:

1.2 TB x 24 hours/day x 4 days = 115.2 TB-hours

Flash storage (LUMI-F) billing¶

The flash storage backed by LUMI-F is billed at a 10x rate compared to the main storage:

TB-hours-billed = 10 x storage-volume x time-used

For example, storing 1.2 TB data for 4 days consumes:

10 x 1.2 TB x 24 hours/day x 4 days = 1152 TB-hours