The main service provided by the SCC refers to the use of the cluster Marvin in its two aspects, Computational Storage and Computing. This fact makes it possible to run scientific software with high resources and computational processing power. It also facilitates the use of command line or desktop sessions to run scientific software and also interactive sessions such as RStudio or Jupyter.

In order to make use of the cluster, these two services must be contracted at the time:

  • Computational Storage
  • Computing

You can hire a service with monthly billing and another as a pack. For example, you could request the Computing service with monthly billing at €0.021 and a 250TB Computational Storage pack and vice versa.

The HPC rate includes 6 monthly hours per user of bioinformatics service, which are for software installations, software related consultations and general advice on the use of the cluster. After these 6 hours, the bioinformatics hour rate will be charged.

Inquiries regarding incidents and problems have no limitations.

 

Computational Storage usage calculation

To calculate the use of storage, the system executes (in an arbitrary period of the day) a query on the use of storage space by user and project. Based on this data, at the end of the month, an average usage per day is calculated from which the invoiced cost is derived.

 

Computing usage calculation

To calculate the use of the Computing service, the system compiles all the jobs executed in the billing month per user. A job is a computational task that is sent to the system to be executed through scientific software.

The jobs performed always make use of two computational resources that are taken into account at the time of invoicing: memory and CPU/GPU (to simplify the CPU/GPU we will call it core).

It is established that a computing unit is a core and 8GB of memory. To establish how many computing units a job uses, the following formula will be followed:

Units = max [C, ceil (M/8)]

where:

C: Cores used

M: Memory used

These units will be multiplied by the hours consumed by the executed job.

Another point to consider is that only the hours of the month in which the work is performed will be counted, that is, even if the work begins before or after the month to be invoiced, only the hours within the month will be taken into account.