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Billing

Running jobs and storing data on the parallel filesystem consume the billing units allocated to your project:

  • for computing, your project is allocated CPU-core-hours
  • for storage, your project is allocated GB-hours.

Compute billing

For compute, your project is allocated CPU-core-hours that are consumed when running jobs. Depending on the partition, the way this billing is carried out differs.

Standard partition

The standard partition is operated in exclusive mode: the entire node will always be allocated. In practice, you 128 core-hours are billed for every allocated node and per hour even if your job requested less than 128 cores per node.

For example, 16 nodes for 12 hours: 

16 nodes x 12 hours x 128 core-hour = 24576 core-hours

Small partition

When using the small partition you are billed per allocated core or if you are above a certain threshold per chunk of 2GB of memory. Here is the formula that is used for billing:

corehours = max(ncore, ceil(mem/2GB)) x time
  • if you use less than 2GB 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
  • if you are using the large memory nodes you will be billed per 2GB slice of memory

For example, 4 cores, 4GB of memory for 1 day:

4 cores x 24 hours = 96 core-hours

For example, 4 cores, 32GB of memory for 1 day:

32GB / 2GB x 24 hours = 384 core-hours

Storage billing

Storage is billed by volume as well as time. The billing units are GB-hours.

Regular Lustre filesystem

On the regular (spinning disk) Lustre filesystem, 1GB of data consume 1GB-hour out of your storage allocation for every hour it stays on the filesystem.

For example, 375GB for 4 days:

375 GB x 4 days x 24 hours = 36000 GB-hours

Flash Lustre filesystem

The flash based filesytem is billed at a 10x rate: 1GB of data consume 10GB-hour out of your storage allocation for every hour it stays on the filesystem. As a consequence, if you don't want to consume your storage allocation too quickly, it's recommended to remove your data from the flash filesystem as soon as possible.

For example, 150GB for 2 days:

150 GB x 2 days x 24 hours x 10 = 72000 GB-hours