Service Catalog
MSI provides over 125 million hours worth of computing for free to University of Minnesota faculty and their collaborators on an annual basis (Getting Access to MSI). Access to MSI's computing resources is limited by the "fair share" algorithm of the SLURM job submission/queueing system, which favors research groups which have completed relatively less computing in the last few weeks. Because the fair share mechanism cannot guarantee access to resources, UMN faculty may purchase hardware that will be added to our existing HPC systems and dedicated to their group’s use.
Please contact help@msi.umn.edu if you are interested in purchasing dedicated access to HPC resources.
| Service | Service Description | Internal Cost | External Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Service Units (External users) | Service Units (SU) are the way that MSI tracks CPU usage on our High Performance Computing resources. A minimum purchase of 200 SUs is required, although this threshold is reduced to 50 SUs when they are bundled with consulting services. 1 SU is equivalent to 345.5 CPU-hours, 2340 GB-hours of memory, or 3.91 GPU-hours on a V100 GPU. | Dedicated compute | $3.07/SU |
| Dedicated Primary Storage | Dedicated Primary Storage is a high performance file system that can be accessed from all MSI computing systems. This storage may be purchased in increments of 1TB and includes nightly snap shots and backups, general management, and maintenance. | $122.58/TB/Yr |
$700/TB/Yr $175/TB/Qtr |
|
Dedicated Second-Tier Storage |
Dedicated Second-Tier Storage is a high density storage platform, well suited for storing less frequently used data. Second-Tier storage is built on a Ceph storage cluster and may be accessed using the S3 interface. Second-Tier storage can also be accessed via Globus. | $40.53/TB/Yr | $130/TB/Yr |
|
Archival Tier Storage |
No longer available at MSI. |
N/A |
N/A |
|
Research Computing Cloud Environment |
A subscription-based infrastructure as a service that enables users to operate within their own self-service virtual machines on the spectrum between a low-level bare-metal HPC and a fully virtualized, shared-tenancy mode. Stratus is powered by the Newton version of the OpenStack cloud platform, and is backed by Ceph storage. |
N/A | |
| Consulting, Technical | Support for the operation of high performance computing equipment and software. | Consulting | $230/hr |
| Consulting, Research | Consultation and support for scientific research activities. | Consulting | $230/hr |
| Consulting, Travel | Hours travel to remote site for consultations. | NA | $115/hr |
| Consulting, Training | Workshops and training. | NA | $230/hr |
| Visualization Lab | MSI's visualization laboratory provides researchers with access to equipment for high-defininition presentations and interactive graphical analyses of very large or complex systems and data through the use of high-performance networking, storage, and computational resources. | Visualization Resources | $230/hr |
| Galaxy | The annual cost of a Galaxy instance is based on our consulting rates and will be developed according to the software, computing, and data storage requirements of your project. | Galaxy | Variable |