The IT Service Group operates as a “Service Facility” providing support to users with research server support and consulting. These rates are submitted for annual review to the Division of Financial Affairs.
Contents
Consulting
The ITSG can provide Consulting Services in support of your research efforts. This hourly consulting rate also forms the basis of Server Support recovery (below).
Proposed Rate for Fy24_25: $89.79 per Hour
Server Support
Server support costs are established using and estimated effort based on experience and bench-marking against peers. This support load estimate currently comes to 4.175 hours per year. This annual support load is multiplied the Consulting Rate (above) to establish a “base node charge”.
Supported servers may consist of multiple machines. The first type of machine, commonly referred to as the “head-node”, typically runs the software that manages the cluster compute nodes. This machine(s) is the most specialized and highly customized to meet the needs of the researchers that use the cluster. The second machine type is typically dedicated file servers. Compute cluster nodes typically have very high I/O requirements and therefore often need dedicated fileservers. Finally, there are compute nodes. These are where the computational work actually happens. These nodes are typically identical to one another and therefore by adding additional compute nodes, the amount of work necessary to install and maintain them does not scale linearly.
The following rates take into consideration that the cost to install and maintain additional nodes scales with the total number of machines.
Proposed Rates for Fy24_25:
| Node Number | Per Node Rate |
| 1+ | $374.86 |
| 5+ | $367.36 |
| 10+ | $356.12 |
| 25+ | $337.37 |
| 50+ | $281.14 |
| 75+ | $235.47 |
| 100+ | $187.43 |
Rhodes CAC Fees
Servers housed in the Center for Advanced Computing (CAC) datacenters (as opposed to a dedicated Unit datacenter) carry an additional cost. The CAC charges a “per U” fee for each slot of server rack space a unit occupies. This cost is added directly to the recovery fees for those servers.
Rates for FY24_25: $7.60/month
Billing Process
Once a server is up and running, billing will be run “Quarterly”(Q1: 7/1 to 8/15; Q2: 8/16 to 12/31; Q3: 1/1 to 5/15; Q4: 5/16 to 6/30) and submitted to your college/campus finance office for processing on the designated accounts. Recovery fees are calculated on a daily accrual.