ITS Systems Charging

Peter Marshall, Manager of Research and Instructional Support
Information Technology Services, UWO


SUN Ultra Sparc E4000 (panther.uwo.ca)

CPU Rate $1.00 per CPU Hour
1800-0800 & weekends $0.50 per CPU Hour
Disk Storage (current): $0.035/MB/day
Disk Storage (May 1): $0.005/MB/day
or $2/MB/year

Cray J90SE (hpc.uwo.ca)

Users can elect to be charged in either of two different ways:
  1. By hourly use.
  2. By the Cray Fair Share method.

Hourly Use

Peak (daily) $10 per processor-hour
Off-Peak (1800-0600) $5 per processor-hour

Hourly users are allocated one share in order to use the Cray Fair Share priority allocation method, but will be billed at the hourly rate.

Fair Share Method (operational May 1)

UWO has implemented the Cray "Fair Share Method" for charging. Users may buy shares, and then job priorities are allocated according to the user's proportion of currently active shares. Additionally heavy-users during one weekly period will have their relative priority downgraded for the next period.

Shares are available at a cost of $500 per share per year. External users may not buy more than 10 shares.

Shares are valid for one year starting on May 1.

NO charge for local disk -- to be used for scratch space (not backed up)

VAX/VMS System (uwovax.uwo.ca)

Base rate $70/CPU-hour
1800-0800 & weekends $35/CPU-hour
Low priority batch $14/CPU-hour
Disk Storage $035/MB/day
Disk Storage (May 1): $0.025/MB/day

The Near Future

Lowering disk charges by May 1 to $2/MB/yr (7x reduction from current rates). VAX rates will be reduced slightly from $.035/MB/day to $.025/MB/day since that machine is close to capacity and we don't want to have to upgrade it.
    All students (September 1997) and eventually all faculty and staff as well will automatically be provided with accounts probably with a fairly low disk quota and something like $2 to be spent on CPU, disk space and/or printing. Information services programs like email, lynx and ftp will continue to be "free".
    Project accounts will probably be set up in a similar way with some minimal amount of funds, pre-deposited.
    Shares on hpc (available May 1, 1997) are definitely the cheap way to get computing done on the Cray.

Peter Marshall <peter@julian.uwo.ca>
Version 1.2, last updated 1997-04-09 by peter