Become an Investor

The Enhanced Condominium Model

The Kamiak cluster follows a condominium-style model of resource management. Investors, which are individual researchers or groups of researchers, purchase compute nodes and storage from our service catalogue. These resources are then installed in Kamiak and administered by the Kamiak system administrators. Investors in the Kamiak cluster are guaranteed prioritized on-demand access to their purchased resources.

Idle compute resources are made available to the general user community through a shared backfill queue that includes all compute nodes. However, this general access to resources can be preempted at any time by investors when they want to use the resources they have purchased.

Service Options

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.

Customers may install and use any software needed.  If installation assistance is required, an average lead time of 2-4 weeks should be expected.

Eligibility

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

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.

Availability

Kamiak is designed to provide 24x7x365 availability with minimal unscheduled downtime.  Kamiak may be taken offline for scheduled maintenance on a monthly or as-needed basis. Please see here for further information about maintenance schedules.

Service Catalogue

Standard Compute Nodes

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, or alternate configurations (e.g., different memory configurations).

ProcessorsCores per NodeMemoryLocal DiskNetworksWarranty/Service TermBudgetary Estimate
Dual Intel Xeon Gold 633864512GB, 3200 MT/s DDR4NVMe SSD•10/25Gb Ethernet
•100Gb InfiniBand		5 years$17,200

Special Compute Nodes

If you are interested in purchasing a non-standard compute resource, i.e., a node equipped with a GPU accelerator, more memory, or a larger core count, please submit a request to our Service Desk to get an up to date budgetary estimate. Below are some examples of large memory and GPU based specialty nodes.

Node TypeProcessorsCores per NodeMemoryAccelerator optionLocal DiskNetwork cardsWarranty/Service TermBudgetary Estimate
Large Memory - 1TBDual Xeon Gold 6338641 TB (3200 MT/s DDR4)NANVMe SSD•10/25Gb Ethernet
•100Gb InfiniBand		5 years$22,500
Large Memory - 2TBDual Xeon Platinum 8368762 TB (3200 MT/s DDR4)NANVMe SSD•10/25Gb Ethernet
•100Gb InfiniBand		5 years$40,500
GPU -x2Dual Xeon Gold 6338641 TB (3200 MT/s DDR4)2x NVIDIA Tesla A100 - (80GB vRAM, 6,912 CUDA cores & 432 Tensor cores each)NVMe SSD•10/25Gb Ethernet
•100Gb InfiniBand		5 years$46,000
GPU -x4Dual Xeon Platinum 8368762 TB (3200 MT/s DDR4)4x NVIDIA Tesla A100 (80GB vRAM, 6,912 CUDA cores & 432 Tensor cores each)NVMe SSD•10/25Gb Ethernet
•100Gb InfiniBand		5 years$99,500

Storage

All users are provided with a home directory with a set limit. Users may also take advantage of the performant scratch file space to temporarily store data. If you would like additional long term “Project Storage”, this can be purchased through the Service Desk in 500GB increments.

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 TypeUsable Storage AmountFunding SourceYearly Cost
Project Storage500GB unitFederal grants/contracts$45 /year
Project Storage500GB unitAll other sources$49 /year