About the Computing Facilities Funding Model

Overview

This page gives an overview of the Computing Facilities funding model and includes information about the specific resources and services offered.

The service definitions and respective rates are based on allowable costs and approved annually by Finance and Treasury. Because CS Computing Facilities is a Recharge Center, all costs are recovered via these approved rates. At the end of each fiscal year, each service will yield some surplus (recoveries exceed expenses) or deficit (expenses exceed expenses). These differences are rolled into the rate calculations for the next fiscal year.

CS Department Subsidy

The entire Computing Facilities budget is cost-recovered via the recovery categories described below. The CS Department subsidizes a large portion of the budget indirectly by paying the user account fees (see below) for the vast majority of users. See: Getting a CS Account

In addition, the department may, from time-to-time, subsidize costs associated with services. Generally, subsidies will apply to chartstrings in department 255 as well as services sponsored by CS faculty.

Recovery Categories

Actual rates are found on the Rate Sheet (login required).

High-level descriptions of the services follow. Details are elsewhere in the CS Guide.

Storage - Project Space

Based on allowable costs, we have developed a rate (expressed as $/TiB/day) for storage on our departmental file system. The department covers the cost of non-project space and for unallocated space.

Because the distribution of storage utilization is characterized by a small number of large consumers with the remaining consumers forming a long tail, there is diminishing value in charging tiny amounts and generating monthly invoices to these consumers. Therefore, the department will, in most cases, provide a base subsidy on daily usage. Usage above the base threshold may also be subsidized by the department with a rate subsidy.

The billing methodology is as follows:

1. Each project space is assigned to a responsible party. This is generally a faculty member who is a PI on a grant. (See below.)
2. Each day, for each project space, we record its quota and its actual usage. The maximum of these two values is the chargeable storage for that project space on that day.
3. Each day, for each responsible party, we total the chargeable storage across all of their assigned project spaces (grouping by chartstring) to get the total chargeable storage for the responsible party for that day (by chartstring).
4. Each day, for each responsible party, using the daily rates, we convert the total chargeable storage for each tier to a dollar amount and add them together to get the total charge for the responsible party for the day.
5. Each day, for each responsible party, we proportionally apply the base subsidy to "subsidizable" chartstrings. (Unused daily threshold does not "roll-over.")
6. Each billing period (monthly), we total the daily net charge for each responsible party to determine the amount to bill to the chart string.

For requests for new project spaces, we will require the name of the responsible party and notify them when we create the space. Similarly, whenever we get a request to change the quota of an existing project space, we will notify the responsible party.

Responsible Parties / Billing

For billing purposes, each project space has an associated "Responsible Party." Generally, responsible parties include faculty (who may be PIs on grants or have start-up funds), or the department manager who is the responsible party for the administrative staff and for the lecturers. Faculty advisers are the responsible party for their advisees and guests.

Each project space may be charged to different chartstring(s).

Professional Services

Subject to capacity, CS Staff can provide dedicated professional services at an hourly rate.

Examples of professional services include longer-term items such as support of dedicated research equipment (including specifying, purchasing, deploying, administering, and maintaining equipment but excluding servers in the "server service" as described below), web development, and research software development as well as short-term, one-off items such as back-up A/V support (video recording), equipment moves, etc.

When a request to CS Staff goes beyond what we provide as baseline support for a regular user account and enters the realm of professional services, we will first meet with the requesters to discuss the scope and expected costs before work will begin.

For researchers with shared resources that require ongoing maintenance, a given long-term tracking ticket can be shared across multiple chartstrings and these chartstrings may be from different researchers.

Server Service

Beginning FY2025, the time billed to faculty for purchasing, deployment, administration, management, configuration, and other costs related to the Ionic cluster (and a few other similarly managed servers) have been repackaged into a "server service" and billed at level rate per server per day. As with all recharge center fees, any surplus or deficit from one fiscal year will be rolled over into the rate for the following fiscal year.

User Accounts

We now have two categories of user accounts:

• Regular Accounts (which includes "Regular Guest Accounts")
• Limited Guest Accounts

Note that the category of "unfunded guest account" has been replaced with a nominally funded "limited guest account."

Costs for all accounts are recovered via a fee and require a chart-string at the time of the request. The department covers the fee (and provides the chart-string) for most regular accounts (e.g., CS faculty/staff/students). Guest accounts (regular or limited) for external collaborators are generally funded by the respective research project. All regular user accounts are billed equally (e.g., faculty, staff, grads, ugrads) for the full duration they are active (even during summers, sabbaticals, and transition periods).