CoS HPC cost model listening session

Over the past few months, a team from the EVPR, OIT, EVP-A&F, and GTRC has been working with Institute leadership to develop a more sustainable and flexible way to support research cyberinfrastructure. This new model is described in more detail below and will affect researchers who leverage PACE services. The model enjoys strong support, but it is not yet fully approved.  We are communicating at this stage because we wanted you to be aware of the upcoming changes and we welcome your feedback. Please submit comments to the PACE Team <pace-support@oit.gatech.edu> or to Lew Lefton <lew.lefton@gatech.edu>. This listening session is organized for the College of Sciences.

In a nutshell, PACE will transition from a service that purchases nodes with equipment funds, to a service which operates as a Cost Center. This means that major research cyberinfrastructure (including compute and storage services) will be treated like other core facilities. This new model will begin as the transition to the new equipment in the CODA data center happens. We recognize that this represents a shift in how we think about research computing. But, as shown below, the data indicates that the long-term benefits are worth the change.  When researchers only pay for actual consumption – similar to commercial cloud offerings from AWS, Azure, and GCP – there are several advantages:

• Researchers have more flexibility to leverage new hardware releases instead of being restricted to hardware purchased at a specific point in time.

• The PACE team can use capacity and usage planning to make compute cycles available to faculty in days or week as opposed to having to wait for months due to procurement bottlenecks.
• We have secured an Indirect Cost Waiver on both PACE services and commercial cloud offerings for two years to allow us to collect data on the model and see how it is working.
• Note that a similar consumption model has been used successfully at other institutions such as Univ. Washington and UCSD, and this approach is also being developed by key sponsors (e.g. NSF’s cloudbank.org).
• A free tier that provides any PI the equivalent of 10,000 CPU-hours on a 192GB compute node and 1 TB of project storage at no cost.

For further details on the new cost model, please visit out Web page