Research Computing Pricing

Many research computing services are available to campus researchers with no fees, see https://oit.duke.edu/service/research-computing/ for more details. If these services are not sufficient to meet data storage and computational needs, there are several rate based infrastructure offerings intended to be used for research computing provided by OIT. These rates are valid for all research computing services, including the Duke Compute Cluster, stand-alone needs such as hosting, and the PN for Research. Rates are recalculated annually.  To date, rates have either been maintained or reduced for equivalent services year over year.

Storage

NAS storage is available for all types of research use cases for data storage, this includes the Duke Compute Cluster, stand-alone needs, and the PN for Research. Research-Block storage is only used for virtual machine operating system and applications installations and is rarely used for another purpose.

As a sample, using the above rates, additional cluster storage (Research-NAS) is about $93 per TB per year (7 day snapshot included). Group owners can now self-service increase group storage up to 10TB in Research Toolkits. Archival storage (Datacommons) is $62 per TB per year (with backups $144 per TB per year).

Compute

For standard compute nodes, pricing for compute nodes is $85/core/year. Memory (RAM) is generally allocated to the virtual machine based on available capacity. ***This $85 is for compute only and the storage cost needs to be added at the above Research-Block rate (For Example a 10 core VM with 100 Gb of Storage would be ($85/Core/Year10 cores) + ($0.50/Gb/Yr 100 Gb) = $900/Yr)

GPU

In addition to standard compute nodes, OIT offers GPU compute capabilities.  Effective August 1, 2023 OIT has changed the methodology used for offering and pricing its GPU service.  Each GPU comes with a standard configuration of compute, memory, and storage that is included in the price. The current standard GPU is a Nvidia a5000.

Rates for GPUs are as follow:

Researcher Owned Research Computing Managed Server

In addition to rate based compute solutions, for dedicated servers, researchers may directly purchase a server through Research Computing. Purchased servers are directly supported by Research Computing in a Duke data center with no additional fees for the research team (so a 1x cost only). Standard hardware maintenance of 5 years is purchased as part of the server so there are no annual costs for maintenance of the servers, sysadmin, or hosting charges. The server will be fully supported for its useful life (often beyond the 5 years). Since PIs are directly purchasing a server, pricing varies as we update standards and ordering volume fluctuates. 

To request pricing for a hosted server or new rate based research storage or compute please contact oitresearchsupport@duke.edu.

For grant proposal resources, see:  https://rc.duke.edu/grants/proposal-resources/

 

Pricing Updated August 1, 2023