RCC announces new funding model, a new service, and more changes

The RCC Management Board and Executive Committees recently approved some changes to the way we charge for services. These changes were announced at our October 12 Town Hall event.

A summary of the changes is as follows:

  • We are significantly reducing our rates for storage and NCUs (normalized compute units).
  • We are extending the standard contract length for NCUs from five years to seven years.
  • We are introducing a new service: Flexible Compute Servers (details below).
  • Every academic year, we will make 350 of the newest cores available to the free general access queues/partitions.
  • We are setting aside a 400TB storage pool for researchers to request on-demand no-cost storage (details below).

New Flexible Compute Service

Sometimes, our standard compute and storage services don't cover the needs of every research group on campus. To address this, we are now working on a way for research groups to add nodes with custom hardware configuration to our cluster.

This will make it possible for a researcher to specify the features that she wants on her compute node(s) above and beyond our standard configuration. For example, our 2021/2022 compute nodes will have a standard configuration of 512GB of RAM. If a research group needs more than that amount on a single node or if they want more local storage, they can order one with more RAM or SSDs.

We are working with FSU Procurement Services to make customizable servers available through the FSU SpearMart procurement service. Researchers can choose specific customization options and order the servers through their departmental purchasing managers. Once ordered, RCC will install and manage the servers, where they will be connected to our job scheduler and storage systems.

Free storage allocations

We know that storage resources are more in-demand than ever. Starting at the beginning of next year, the RCC will set aside a 400TB storage pool that researchers can request portions of with the option to renew annually. The RCC Management Board will approve all storage requests.

We'll be releasing more details as we roll this service out over the next few months.

In the meantime, if you want to follow up on any of the above, please send us an email: support@rcc.fsu.edu.