Our partnership program allows researchers and research groups at FSU to purchase dedicated resources on the HPC and our storage systems. Access will always be free for all software, with universal access to HPC Slurm accounts (aka partitions) and primary storage allocations.

The Research Computing Center is an auxiliary unit at FSU. All our purchases are processed through internal purchase orders and are a one-time charge to your budget. The exception is the monthly NCU service, which was created to allow recurring payments to provide more flexibility. Purchase orders expire at the end of the fiscal year but only need to be renewed monthly for the NCU service.

HPC Dedicated Resources

Research groups who buy into the HPC gain priority access to resources in the HPC and get access to their own dedicated Slurm account (partition) for queuing jobs. We sell HPC resources in increments of Normalized Compute Units, which consist of the following:

• One processor core
• 4 to 8 GB RAM
• Storage is no longer included in the NCU (as of November 2022)

Notes:

(*) An NCU with five years of service will be extended with a two year "no-cost" best-effort extension in order to make the transition to newer grants easier.

(**) The monthly cost will be charged on a recurring basis, but the amount of NCU can be adjusted before each billing cycle.

GPU Nodes

GPU nodes can be purchased on a per-node, 5-year basis.

Storage Purchase Options

You can purchase additional storage on our parallel storage system (GPFS) or archival system

Consulting

In addition to our general service and support, we offer dedicated support and consulting time for purchase. This may include programming, work on special research projects, or assignment of a staff FTE for dedicated support. We handle these on a case-by-case basis. Contact us to inquire.

Virtual Machines

Virtual machines are available on a buy-in basis. We offer this service to grant-funded projects only; our partners in ITS also provide virtual machine services for departmental or non-research related use.