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.

Service Catalog

Compute Nodes

Below are the configurations of compute nodes that are available for purchase.

All nodes come with a 5-year warranty.

Please note that these prices are estimates and are subject to change.
If you are planning on purchasing a node or applying for grant funding, please contact our Service Desk for up to date pricing and availability.

Node TypeProcessorsCores per NodeMemoryNetwork CardsCost
Standard (Dell R670)Dual Intel Xeon 6760P1281TB•10/25Gb Ethernet
•100Gb InfiniBand		$35,000
Large (Dell R670)Dual Intel Xeon 6760P1281.5TB•10/25Gb Ethernet
•100Gb InfiniBand		$44,000
Super (Dell R670)Dual Intel Xeon 6787P1722TB•10/25Gb Ethernet
•100Gb InfiniBand		$67,000
Node TypeProcessorsCores per NodeMemoryAcceleratorNetwork cardsCost
GPU x2 (Dell R760xa)Dual Xeon Gold 6438Y+64512GB2x NVIDIA H100 NVL 96GB PCIe•10/25Gb Ethernet
•100Gb InfiniBand		$81,780
GPU x4 (Dell R760xa)Dual Xeon Platinum 8460Y+801 TB4x NVIDIA H100 80GB PCIe•10/25Gb Ethernet
•100Gb InfiniBand		 $147,600

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.

In addition, archive storage for cold data used in research computing can be rented on an annual basis by a faculty sponsor. The archive storage is accessible from login, dtn, and globus nodes for data transfer, but not from compute nodes. Minimal rental of archive storage is 10TB/year, and requires an active lab folder co-rental of 10TB/year.

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.

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.

Storage TypeRental UnitFunding SourceYearly Cost
Lab storage500GBFederal grants/contracts$45 /year
Lab storage500GBAll other sources$49 /year
Archive storage*1TBFederal grants/contracts$15 / year
Archive storage*1TBAll other sources$16 / year
*Minimum archive rental is 10TB, requires lab co-rental of 10TB