Service Costing at MSI
Explore the comprehensive service cost table here. While UMN research projects enjoy ample storage allocations, research groups requiring additional primary and secondary storage beyond justified free limits have the option to make annual purchases.
Please contact us via our Helpdesk, or email help@msi.umn.edu if you are interested in purchasing dedicated access to HPC resources, or wish to set up a consultation with an MSI Expert.
FY 2025 Price List for Dedicated Services and Hardware
| Service | Service Description | Internal Cost | External Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Service Units (External users) | Service Units (SU) are the way that MSI tracks CPU usage on our High Performance Computing resources. A minimum of 200 SUs may be purchased at a time. 1 SU is equivalent to 345.5 CPU-hours, 2340 GB-hours of memory, or 3.91 GPU-hours on a V100 GPU. | $3.00/SU | |
| Dedicated Primary Storage | Dedicated Primary Storage is a high performance file system that can be accessed from all MSI computing systems. This storage may be purchased in increments of 1TB and includes nightly snap shots and backups, general management, and maintenance. | $104.86/TB/Yr | $700/TB/Yr $175/TB/Qtr |
| Dedicated Second-Tier Storage | Dedicated Second-Tier Storage is a high density storage platform, well suited for storing less frequently used data. Second-Tier storage is built on a Ceph storage cluster, and may be accessed using the AWS “S3” interface. Second-Tier storage can also be accessed via Globus. | $32.63/TB/Yr | $130/TB/Yr |
| Archival Tier Storage | No longer available at MSI. | N/A | N/A |
| Research Computing Cloud Environment | A subscription-based infrastructure as a service that enables users to operate within their own self-service virtual machines on the spectrum between a low-level bare-metal HPC and a fully virtualized, shared-tenancy mode. Stratus is powered by the Newton version of the OpenStack cloud platform, and is backed by Ceph storage. | N/A | |
| Consulting, Technical | Support for the operation of high performance computing equipment and software. | $230/hr | |
| Consulting, Research | Consultation and support for scientific research activities. | $230/hr | |
| Consulting, Travel | Hours travel to remote site for consultations. | NA | $115/hr |
| Consulting, Training | Workshops and training. | NA | $230/hr |
| Galaxy | The annual cost of a Galaxy instance is based on our consulting rates and will be developed according to the software, computing, and data storage requirements of your project. | Variable |