Costs and Investment
The HPC cluster is financed and maintained by the IT office of the University of Bern.
The base usage of our cluster is free of charge. Base usage includes:
- 1TB of disk space (aka your home directory)
- 20TB of temporary scratch space for raw data/results
- Access to CPUs and GPUs for computation within limits, see topic Slurm QosS for the details
Investments
Interested users can invest into GPUs, CPUs and storage usage. The investors get elevated access to specific resources. The money raised by investments is used to buy additional resources for the cluster/storage will be purchased with the additional budget.
Get in touch with us!
If you are interested in any of the below investment opportunities, get in touch with us by starting a service request at the Service Portal.
CPUs
For CPUs we do not have formal investment opportunities as of yet. We are working on a business model that allows fair investment in this area. Please get in touch with us if you are interested in getting higher/broader privileges on CPU partitions.
GPUs
We provide far beyond 100 GPUs to our users. In contrast to CPUs we work with preemption on the GPU partition. For your chosen investment you gain the privilege to preempt other user on provided number of GPUs you invested for. That means, whenever there are no free GPUs and you start your job, other user’s jobs are terminated to have yours start almost immediately.
The costs for GPUs are defined as follows (Price is per GPU and year):
| GPU Model | Price |
|---|---|
| GeForce 1080TI/2080TI | CHF 1‘400.- |
| GeForce 3090 | CHF 1‘700.- |
| Tesla P100 | CHF 2100.- |
As the number of GPUs is limited there may be none available but will be ordered for you as soon as possible. Nevertheless, please try to plan ahead as much as possible as GPU availability is quite scarce and it may take months until we can get new cards.
Disk Storage
Workspaces
Every research group has 10TB free of charge quota. This can be used within one or more Workspaces. The amount used per Workspace is set at application time and can be changed later within the limitation.
Additional storage can be purchased for CHF 50 per TB and year. On the application or modification form an quota upper limit can be set. Accounted will be the actual usage only. Therefore, the actual usage is monitored twice a day. The average value of all data points is used for accounting and billed once a year
Research Storage
If you need a storage space for research data that can be used independent from the HPC cluster, that can be mounted using SMB protocol on your desktop, then the research storage opportunity get you covered. Price and service details can be found at Nevertheless, the data on such a research storage share can be directly in our HPC cluster.
Price and service details can be found at the official service page. Beware that the documents are in German only currently.
Statement of Cost for SNSF
On the official service page of the research storage service you can also find a statement of cost for the service that you can add to your SNF proposal in order to budget money for storage costs in your project.