Accounts
Accounts
Please complete the account request form to request an account.
Free Accounts
All members of the Biostatistics department are elibile for a free cluster account with a 300,000 CPU minutes (5000 CPU hours) per semester limit.
The amount of CPU minutes used and available may be checked by running the clusterusage command from the login nodes.
Paid Accounts
Users who wish to use more than 5000 CPU hours must provide a valid shortcode or contribute hardware. Your faculty advisor or PI will be able to provide a shortcode or authorize the use of a contribution account. Unlimited access cluster accounts are available for $1000 per user per year.
Hardware contribution
Faculty may choose to contribute hardware in the form of compute nodes to the department cluster in exchange for cluster access. This is often a good option for funding that allows for purchasing equipment, but not services. Hardware contributions are exchanged for an equivalent dollar amount of cluster access. Currently cluster nodes cost ~$6000, while unlimited cluster access costs $1000 per user per year. This means that if a faculty member contributes one compute node, they will receive 6 account years. This can be allocated as accounts for 6 individuals for one year, one user for 6 years, or any other combination which results in 6 account years of access.
Why contribute hardware instead of running it yourself?
Contributing hardware to the department cluster has many benefits over purchasing and running hardware yourself. The cluster provides a fully managed computing environment including storage, networking, data center space, software, and a full-time system administrator to manage systems and provide user support - all at no additional cost. The computing capabilities of a cluster more closely align with the workloads of most individuals. Workload tends to be bursty. An individual user may need to run a lot of workload all at once, when a paper deadline is approaching for example, and then have periods of time without needing to run any computing workload. When contributing to the cluster, you get access to more than just the hardware you contribute, you get access to the entire cluster. The cluster allows you to use many resources at once when you need them and to let others do the same when you don't.
A simple example illustrates why contributing to the cluster is better than running the hardware yourself. Professor Smith has a simulation that requires 1 CPU core and takes 5 minutes to complete. Professor Smith needs to run this simulation 2500 times. If Professor Smith purchased a 24 CPU core compute node and managed it herself, she could run a maximum of 24 simulations at once. Every 5 minutes, 24 simulations would complete. It would take 525 minutes (8.75 hours) for all of the simulations to complete. If Professor Smith runs this workload on the cluster which has 1092 cores, of which any one user can use 650 at once, she could run 650 simulations at once. This would result in all 2500 simulations completing in a total of 20 minutes.
