Become an Investor

The Kamiak HPC cluster follows a condominium model in which investors can purchase compute nodes and rent storage from our service catalog. CIRC manages placing the purchase orders for compute nodes, which are then installed and administered by our HPC system administrators, at no further cost to the investor.

Investors receive prioritized access to their purchased nodes, while idle compute resources are made available to the entire research community through a shared partition named “kamiak” that includes all compute nodes. However, this open access to resources can be preempted at any time by investors when they need to use the resources they have purchased.

Eligibility

Nodes may be purchased by any faculty member of the WSU research community regardless of their geographical location or unit affiliation.

Customers may purchase between 1 and 10 nodes without prior approval.  Customers wanting to purchase more than 10 nodes must get the approval of the CIRC Advisory Committee.

How to Order

If you would like to become an investor in Kamiak please visit our Service Desk.

Typically, new nodes are deployed within 6 weeks of clearing WSU purchasing.

Storage

Home and lab storage. Each user is provided a home folder of 100GB at no cost, and each faculty sponsor in addition is provided a lab folder of 500GB at no cost. Additional lab folder storage can be rented on an annual basis by a faculty sponsor through the Service Desk.

Archive storage. In addition, archive storage for cold data used in research computing can be rented on an annual basis by a faculty sponsor. Archive data can be moved to and from home, lab, and scratch folders from any login node using standard copy and move commands, or you can also submit batch jobs or idev to the “dtn” partition to perform the file transfers. Globus can also be used for file transfers. However, archive storage is not mounted on compute nodes. The minimal rental of archive storage is 10TB/year, and requires an active lab folder co-rental of 10TB/year.

Maximum rentals. Due to resource constraints, the maximum rental for a faculty sponsor’s lab folder is 60T on the fast Weka storage. Additional rented space should use archive storage. The maximum rental for any archive lab folder is 100TB.

Units. Please note that storage rentals are in gigabytes (GB) which is 1000³ bytes, not gibibytes (GiB) which is 1024³ bytes and thus slightly larger. To see your storage usage be sure to use “df -H” which shows gigabytes and terabytes.