NOTS Cluster

The CRC charges for use of Rice's NOTS cluster, based on the number of users who have access, and based on the amount of compute resources those users consume. These charges are billed monthly to the PI/sponsor associated with each active user. The table below provides the fee amounts.

User Fees

PI and user fees are billed at the monthly rate shown below, if and only if that sponsor has active user login accounts for the month in question. There is no extra user fee charged for a user to have login accounts on other systems (e.g. ORION or RAPID). To control costs, active login accounts may be disabled by the respective sponsor using the user management portal linked from CRC Apply for Account.

User fees are reviewed and set by the CRC and OIT in consultation with the Faculty IT Committee, following policies set by Research Cost Accounting. User fees are subject to change quarterly.

Utilization Fees

We also recover costs based on each PI group's consumption of compute resources on NOTS. One Service Unit (SU) corresponds to one core-hour on the system.  (At this time, we are not charging for GPU service units, this will change in Fall semester 2025).

PIs with condo nodes are charged for service units at the condo price shown below, up to the size of the condo. The PI is charged full price for service units consumed above and beyond the size of condo in a given month.

Example Billing for NOTS Cluster

Imagine a PI who sponsors two graduate students, Alice and Bob, who both use the NOTS cluster.  In a given month, Alice runs 10 jobs, each using 20 compute cores and running for 10 hours.  In the same month, Bob runs 5 jobs, each using 1 compute core for 50 hours.

Alice's total SU for the month is 10 (jobs) x 20 (cores/job) x 10 (hours/job) = 2,000 core-hours (SU) for the month.

Bob's total SU for the month is 5 (jobs) x 1 (core/job) x 50 (hours/job) = 250 core-hours (SU) for the month.

The amount charged to the PI for that month is $77.27, broken down like so:

• $50.00 for the PI account
• $10.00 for Alice's user account
• $10.00 for Bob's user account
• $0.00323 / SU x 2,000 SU = $6.46 for Alice's compute utilization
• $0.00323 / SU x 250 SU = $0.8075 (rounded to $0.81) for Bob's compute utilization

RAPID Cluster

We do not charge per-PI or per-user fees for the RAPID cluster like we do for NOTS, nor do we charge based on RAPID utilization.

GPU Reservations

Typically, the GPU resources on the RAPID cluster are allocated fairly between all users of the cluster.  A research group may optionally reserve GPUs on the cluster to guarantee their group will have access to those GPUs.  A reservation may be made for between one and four A40 GPUs, with a minimum time commitment of one semester.  The table below shows the currently charged rate.  Billing occurs monthly.

Research Data Storage

For information on research data storage costs, including high performance, networked and archival storage tiers, please contact us.