Hyak Use & Purchasing Agreement Policy for the College of the Environment
Purpose
The College of the Environment continues to invest in Hyak, UW’s High-Performance Computing (HPC) facility that support computational science that exceeds the resources of your personal or laboratory systems.
Rationale
High Performance Computing and Artificial Intelligence (Machine Learning) is essential to scientific discovery and to advancing many fields of science. It is the key to furthering the environmental sciences and many other areas that significantly impact society. The amount of data available in the environmental sciences has grown exponentially over the last decade, and the wide availability of the output from model simulations has accelerated discovery. HPC at UW (University of Washington) provides the necessary infrastructure to: (a) share expertise and experience in high performance computing, artificial intelligence and data, scientific computing, and its application across a broad range of disciplines that are critical to the State of Washington and the nation; (b) educate the next generation of leaders who will continue to address the most challenging scientific, engineering, AI, and societal problems; and (c) enhance UW’s leadership in research and education by providing faculty, students, researchers, and staff with access to, and the capability to use, the HPC resources that they require.
Hyak provides a scale of computing that falls in between typical laboratory-scale computing and what is available at large super-computing facilities. With Hyak, UWIT (UW Information Technology) provides a central space with air conditioning, power, disaster recovery, backup, and high-speed networks for HPC infrastructure. UWIT provides operational and technical support to HYAK slice owners and users. Individual large units (primarily colleges) are designated Tier Sponsors if they purchase large quantities of slots at a discounted price. The annual (yearly with a 4-year contract) non-tiered slot cost is $1,750 per slot. Tier sponsors save their slice owners a minimum of $950/year or $3,800 over 4 years per slot. Tier sponsors decide how to share and use their allotted slots beyond or in accordance with HYAK polices set by the HYAK Governance Board. Individual Pis or laboratories purchase cpu or gpu slices which reside in the slots. One cpu slice will use one slot. A GPU slice will use 2-4 slots, depending on the GPU. High-performance computers are more efficient when all the slices are in use resulting in big advantages for owners and users of HYAK computer slices. These advantages include the use of unused slices for computing jobs (as designated by HYAK itself) as well HYAK will continually become faster as users either update or add in new faster slices after the 4-year slice end-of-life cycle. The same computing job that was submitted 4 years ago will be much faster 4 years later as new generational slices are brought in to HYAK.
College of the Environment Support
The College of the Environment is designated as a Tier 1 sponsor and has a 5-year commitment to purchase 100 slots at a discounted price of $800 per slot in Hyak for the period FY23 to FY28. Hyak is made up of CPU and GPU slices with specific specifications and they must be purchased through UWIT (for reasons of hardware homogeneity). CPU/GPU slices are priced to include the support for managing the slices over their lifetime (4 years).
eSITS, the College of the Environment Shared Information Technology Services group (esits@uw.edu) is available to help slice owners within the College with Hyak access, use, checkpoint scheduling, questions and learning how to utilize Hyak and HPC for their research needs.
The College of the Environment’s 5-year MOU/commitment breaks down to:
- Initial $60,000 payment for Level 2 Sponsorship for initial 60 slots in FY23.
- Adding an additional 40 slots bumped annual payments to $80,000 for Level 1 sponsorship for 100 total slots in FY24 – FY28.
- Total Monetary Commitment for the MOU of 100 slots: $380,000
- The College has agreed to subsidize the original $300,000 over the 5-year MOU. A yearly $200 per slot fee is needed to cover the addition of 40 slots.
- Oceanography has agreed to pay $50,000 plus the annual $200 yearly slot fee for 10 slots over the 5-year MOU.
- The remainder $80,000 ($20,000 yearly) will be recovered from either $200 yearly slot fee for all node owners. Yearly charges are effective 1/1/24 and will be prorated for FY24.
The breakdown of all 100 College of the Environment slots is as followed:
- 50 Pre-2022 slots.
- 40 Post 2022 slots.
- 10 Oceanography (reserved).
The College of the Environment has invested in a single compute slice needed to manage all other slices in the COENV compute group. Access to this single compute slice and COENV compute group is restricted to Post-2022 slice owners, researchers wanting to test out how HYAK works before they invest in slices, or by special circumstances granted by eSITS.
Use Agreement. Pre-2023 Slices
Owners of compute slices purchased before 2023 agree to the following use policy:
- All compute slices must be replaced, retired, or be on an extended operation after the 4-year end-of-life cycle as outlined by UWIT’s HYAK Extended Use Policy.
- Compute slice owners will be charged $200 per year for each slot they are using. Yearly charges are affective 1/1/24 and will be prorated at $100 for FY24.
- Slices purchased before 2023 may continue to use their own dedicated HYAK group and slots.
- No expansion of slots will be permitted for pre-2023 slice owners.
Use Agreement. Post-2022 Slices
Owners of computer slices purchased after 2022 agree to the following use policy:
- All compute slices must be replaced, retired, or be on an extended operation after the 4-year end-of-life cycle as outlined by UWIT’s HYAK Extended Use Policy.
- Slice owners will be charged $200 per year for each slot they are using. Yearly charges are affective 1/1/24 and will be prorated at $100 for FY24.
- All slices will be purchased, maintained, and owned by eSITS. Those that wish to purchase CPU/GPU slices may either transfer funds to the eSITS worktag or provide a worktag to eSITS at the time of purchase.
- All slices within the 40 COENV slots will be deployed within the COENV user group.
- Slice owners in the COENV group may only share the use of their purchased nodes within their lown ab group. Unit sharing of a researchers node is not permitted.
- Slice owners may cooperatively use and share all purchased slices in the COENV group with permissions from the other slice owners. Slice owners and their lab group are restricted to use of their own slices unless they communicate an agreement with the other slice owners.
- ESITS will work with all parties to resolve disputes of computation cycles and times in the HYAK scheduler.
CPU & GPU Pricing (July 2024)
- Standard CPU Slice. 32-core AMD, 256GB RAM. 1TB of storage. $3,892
- Big Memory CPU Slice. 32-core AMD, 512GB RAM. 1TB of storage. $7,706
- L40 GPU. 2 32-core CPU’s, 384GB RAM and 48GB RAM per GPU. $17,889.
- H100 GPU. 2 32-core CPU’s, 384GB RAM and 80GB RAM per GPU. $46,148. Special Case only. 4 committments REQUIRED before the $200,000 purchase.
- Time to deployment varies per CPU/GPU slice purchase.
Users must fill out the UWIT HYAK Purchasing Request Form and *MUST* coordinate the purchase with the Director of Information Technology for the College of the Environment.