The VACC is supported by a tiered, pay-per-use policy. All account owners of the VACC elect to join one of three tiers on a yearly basis. We use the UVM fiscal year calendar. The combined income from all paying owners supports full-time IT professionals who facilitate software implementation, programming assistance, and scheduling needs for the researchers.
To calculate the tier fees for the upcoming fiscal year, subscribers (and all additional users they add to their account) are placed into a tier based on the total number of compute units (CUs) expended by their group during the past fiscal year. Additional future owners are also added to each tier based on expected increases.
All Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) based on hardware purchased by VACC account owners are in effect. If you purchase dedicated hardware for the VACC, you are required join Tier 2 or Tier 3.
Tier payment will change annually dependent on UVM’s internal funding commitment and grants awarded to the VACC.
Three Tiers
All three tiers enjoy full use of the VACC, with each tier being granted differing amounts of compute units. Please see the table below for details.
| TIER | COST FY22 | COMPUTE UNIT* |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | No cost to user** | Under 250,000 |
| 2 | $1,000 | 250,000 - 3,000,000 |
| 3 | $4,000 | Over 3,000,000 |
*A compute unit (CU) represents 1 hour of wall-clock utilization on a CPU core. Any of our current GPUs (V100, A100, AMD MI50) will use a CU at 1/60 of an hour (1 minute on 1 GPU = 1 CU)
**Subsidized by the VACC. Available only to UVM Faculty and Staff.
Disk Storage per Tier
"Block" is the total size of your disk storage. "Files" is the total number of files allowed to be written to disk. For more information about filesystems and hard/soft limits, see Disk Quotas.
PLEASE NOTE:
- gpfs1 is backed up approximately 3 times a week.
- gpfs2 is scratch space. It is not backed up.
| TIER | FILESYSTEM | BLOCK Soft Limit / Hard Limit | FILES Soft Limit / Hard Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | gpfs1 | 2TB / 4TB | 1M / 1.5M |
| 1 | gpfs2 | 4TB / 8TB | 1.5M / 3M |
| 2 | gpfs1 | 8TB / 13TB | 3M / 6M |
| 2 | gpfs2 | 15TB / 25TB | 4M / 8M |
| 3 | gpfs1 | 20TB / 25TB | 6M / 12M |
| 3 | gpfs2 | 35TB / 45TB | 8M / 16M |
Additional Disk Storage
If you would like information about greater disk storage than your tier allows, please email us at vacc@uvm.edu. The rate for disk storage is calculated at the current price for High Throughput Storage (gpfs2) with an additional fee for installation and maintenance. The life of additional disk storage is 4 years.
Options for Funding
From an Existing Award
- Review current grant to determine if there is funding available.
- Contact granting organization for approval.
- Contact Andi Elledge aelledge@uvm.edu for internal process and approval.
From a New Proposal
- When writing the budget, include a line item under ADP & Computing Services: F6020 (for account code 80047).
FY21 Tier 2 is $1,000 and Tier 3 is $4,000. - In the Budget Justification for the line item, supply the following text:
Support is requested at (include amount) per year totaling (include amount) over the award period to provide high-performance computing services to the PI as part of the scope of this grant on behalf of UVM's Vermont Advanced Computing Center (VACC) cluster services. (*ONE SPECIFIC SENTENCE ABOUT THIS GRANT AS TO THE COMPUTATIONAL NEEDS*) The VACC is a multi-thousand core “big compute” Linux cluster, with hundreds of terabytes of GPFS storage. This service will help the PI and their students compile, deploy, store and retrieve the computational components of the proposed work. Additionally, the VACC will provide the required training for the PI and their students including system documentation. As part of the service an IT technician will aid with the selection and implementation of any system upgrades and software installations required for the proposed work. - For the Facilities, Equipment, and Other Resources section of the proposal you can use VACC cluster specs.
Internal transfer of funds
If you have internal funding, such as research incentive funds or a start-up account, please contact Andi Elledge at aelledge@uvm.edu and she will work with your department business manager to transfer the funds for your use.
VACC Voucher Fund
The Office of the Vice President for Research will issue a voucher to support faculty interested in advancing their research or teaching by incorporating computational and research support services from the Vermont Advanced Computing Center. This funding is to support UVM faculty with computational needs that do not currently have grants or internal departmental funding that supports VACC use.
Example Voucher Qualifications:
- New hires - to support the Deans in their efforts to attract researchers to UVM.
- Faculty that are moving existing research from personal computers to high-performance computing and need help with advanced coding.
- Users interested in employing machine learning in future research but have minimal previous experience with HPC and are unable to transition their scientific workflows to GPUs (i.e. DeepGreen) without help.
- Faculty that require computational results to submit a grant or advice and support for proposal development related to high-performance computing and machine learning.
- Faculty interested in providing access to cyberinfrastructure resources and services to students to support teaching across all fields.
Voucher amount is up to $10,000 and will include priority cluster access and services. Vouchers must be used prior to end of fiscal year and cannot be carried over into additional years.
Contact: Andi Elledge at aelledge@uvm.edu.