Charging structure

Standard access to our High Performance Computing systems is unmetered and free-at-the-point-of-use.

This includes:

• A fair share access to computer resources, where your jobs are scheduled as resources permit.
• A standard entitlement of 1TB of private working space.
• Access to advice from our support team.

Please refer to our "Get Access" web page for information on how to register for our key services.

Reservations

If you find yourself requiring more than the standard service provides, for example to meet a specific deadline, you may pay to reserve compute resources.  The current charges for these reservations are: 

CPU Compute: is £0.01 per (physical) core-hour.

GPU Compute: is £0.16 per GPU-hour.

and you are charged for the compute capacity reserved, not used. Reservations are considered on a first-come, first-served basis with the requested size of the reservation and the current demands on the HPC facilities taken into consideration. 

Requests for reservations can be made by raising a ticket with us using our standard form (see Get support); these requests should be made by the PI, grant holder or authorised user of the account to be used.

If you previously made an advance purchase for express access and still have a remaining balance, you may use that balance to pay for reservations.

Each research project* is eligible for 2TB of online storage, split across all of the associated Research Data Store (RDS) project allocations.

*We consider a research project to be a unique entry in the college's grant management system - ie a project account with a P or PS code. Non-project GL accounts can also be used but these receive no standard entitlement.

The FEC rates for Research Data Store Project Storage are below. These can be costed in Worktribe using the Research Computing Service TRAC (Full Economic Costing) charge‑out rates.

Single Copy (standard): £1.50/TB/month

Dual Copy: £3.00/TB/month

We will normally bill the supporting project or GL account monthly. Where funds are subject to a sunset date, we are able to accept non-refundable advance payments.

The RDF-Active is the new storage facility that will be gradually replacing the RDS Project Storage. RDF‑Active stores all data in two physically separate locations, so every piece of data is held in two copies.

The FEC rates for the RDF-Active can be found below. These can be costed in Worktribe using the Research Computing Service TRAC (Full Economic Costing) charge‑out rates.

Cost: £1.50/TB/month

RDF‑Active is charged on a prepaid basis for a minimum term of 12 months, based on the requested storage quota.

Imperial College makes a strategic annual investment in excess of £4 million in research computing in recognition of its broad utility to the whole academic community. The Research Computing Service, as part of the College's central ICT Department, administers this investment providing a high-quality, free at the point of use, service encompassing access to compute, research data storage, training and professional research software engineering services. The Service has over 5000 active users, representing over 50% of the College's active research projects. 

The RCS's compute estate is tailored to support the diverse computing needs of the research community, from high-throughput capacity (60k cores) to high-end capability (17k cores), the latter providing a complement to national Tier-1 resources. Supporting this is a high-capacity research data system (14PB capacity) appropriate for storage of data through all stages of its lifecycle. The RCS is working towards ISO-certification of the RDS for the secure storage of sensitive data. The Service's equipment is housed in a modern ISO 27001-certified commercial data-centre providing secure, highly reliable hosting. 

Imperial College researchers benefit from significant resource allocation free at the point of use. Where a project's needs exceed the Service's standard offering, compute and storage is available at flexible, low-cost metered rates. 

Additionally, the RCS provides regular training for Service users at all levels of experience, but with particular emphasis on training for early-career researchers, equipping them with the board skillset required for effective research computing. A recent strategic development for the RCS is the creation of a Research Software Engineering team staffed by professional engineers and available for expert, in-depth consultancy to research projects through both short and long-term engagements. 

• See the first tab, High Performance Computing, under reservations for the rate for compute time
• RDS (Research Data Store) storage rates can be found on our Research Data Store tab.
• RDF-Active storage rates can be found on the RDF-Active tab.
• Research Software Engineering consultancy is available at a rate of £400/day, but there are also free support available as described in the Research Software Engineering page.

These services cost on grants in Worktribe under the Research Computing Service charge-out facility.

The Research Software Engineering Team offers a selection of paid for consultancy services as well as free options to support its mission of increasing the quality, impact and sustainability of the research software developed at Imperial. You can find all details in the Research Software Engineering page, but as a sumary, the initiatives they offer are:

• Software projects: Substantial software projects to add features, improve sustainability or build high-quality tools from the ground up. This includes providing ongoing support to teams developing software themselves. These are charged at a rate of £450/day.
• Open-source booster: Free, short (<4 days) collaborations to maximise the impact of open-source software developed at Imperial.
• Code surgeries: Free, 30 min fortnightly sessions to provide advice on programming best practices, solve coding issues or guide researchers to the right tools.