Prices for using PDC resources

Business research

If your company uses (or wants to start using) high performance computing (HPC) for research or development, PDC can help. PDC provides these HPC services at cost to support business/industrial research and development (R&D):

• Sweden's fastest greenest supercomputing system with CPU & GPU partitions,
• a large range of software packages for research (and more can be installed, if needed),
• data storage facilities, and
• assistance from application experts/research software engineers - either with adapting code or to prepare applications to use HPC services.

PDC has been collaborating with a wide range of companies  doing different types of research using HPC for nearly two decades. Businesses are welcome to contact PDC at business-unit@pdc.kth.se  to discuss how PDC can help your company achieve its R&D goals using HPC.

How does pricing for HPC services through PDC work for businesses?

• prices reflect the actual cost of services (PDC does not make a profit as it is part of a governmental agency) and take into account both fixed costs (such as hardware) and estimates of variable costs (like power, cooling and maintenance of the system) over several years
• pay only for what you use, except for storage where (for obvious reasons) the price is for the amount of storage that your company requests
• no hidden costs (unlike many cloud providers)
• software is mainly free, unless a commercial licence is needed (in which case PDC can help to get the software your company needs to use set up on our system)

Examples of prices for businesses using PDC's HPC services

Calculations on Dardel's CPU partition

• 0.25 SEK per core hour - charged on the number of core hours used by or reserved for your jobs when they run (see notes below), not on the total number of core hours allocated to your company
  • This means your company may request a large allocation of core hours for a big project, but if the project only uses part of that allocation, that is all you will be charged for.
  • The price for core hours also includes basic support (from the PDC Support team) related to your company's usage of the system as part of the particular allocation.

Note: When running jobs, it is important to be aware of the difference between requesting that the job run on dedicated nodes or on shared nodes as this can affect the price.

• If your job specifies that it should be run on dedicated nodes/servers, then all the cores in those nodes are reserved for your job and your company is charged for using all of the cores, even if the job does NOT use all of them. This is what happens as the default if your job does not explicitly ask to run on shared nodes.
• If your job specifies that it should run on shared nodes, then any cores in the nodes that are not needed by your job are available for other jobs. This means your company is only charged for the cores that your job actually uses. However, there is a risk that jobs running on shared nodes may interfere with each other, which is why this is not the default option for running jobs.

Tape backup of your data on external servers

• 250 SEK/year for each TB that your company actually stores on the tape backup
  Double tape copy is the standard for tape backup of your data - data stored at PDC is mirrored to two other academic sites within Sweden, and the data never leaves the country. Tape is the most energy-efficient (CO₂-friendly) way to back up data and is also the safest way to store and archive your data.
• Companies that need faster retrieval can opt for disk copy backup - please contact business-unit@pdc.kth.se  for further information.
• If your company also needs backup clients, PDC can arrage that at an additional cost.

Storage on Lustre system

• free - up to 0.5 TB of storage (without backup) is included free for business computing projects
• (without backup) 33 SEK/month for each allocated TB
• (with backup to tape) 75 SEK/month for each allocated TB

Note: The prices for storage are charged according to the number of TB that your company requests and is allocated, rather than according to how much of the allocated storage is used in any given month. This is because the allocated amount of storage must be kept available for your company for the whole month, irrespective of whether your company uses all of it or not.

Prices for using software at PDC for business research

Most of the software packages on the PDC systems are available free to all business and industry researchers who use our systems, although there are a few software packages that are not available to companies in this manner as the licences were bought solely for academic research purposes. For some of the codes that are free to use, a special agreement may need to be made with the software developers before researchers from a particular company can use the code.

If a company wants to use commercial software at PDC, the company will need to purchase the appropriate licence(s) from the software provider, then PDC staff can help to install the software on the PDC systems and, if needed, set up an advanced solution so that the software can only be accessed by researchers from that company.

Academic research

Academic researchers can use PDC's facilities free of charge.

To do this, you need to apply for (and be awarded) an allocation of time and/or storage. The Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) handles applications from Swedish researchers ( Apply for access to SNIC resources ).

All allocations include a basic level of free support by the PDC Support team, Systems staff and Application Experts - just contact support@pdc.kth.se  and tell us what you need help with!

Academic researchers can also apply for extensive assistance for a specific research project as part of their application for a time/storage allocation. This kind of help could involve a significant number of man-hours on the part of one or more SNIC application experts.

Prices when using software at PDC for academic research

Most of the software packages on the PDC systems are freely available to all the academic researchers who use our facilities. However, for some of the codes, a special agreement needs to be made with the software developers before specific researchers (or research groups) can use the code.

PDC can also provide researchers with access to some commercial software packages, though usually research groups need to pay the licence fees for using such software.

Free help to apply for allocations

PDC can provide free assistance to academic and business researchers to help prepare applications for time/storage allocations. Please contact support@pdc.kth.se  if you would like to discuss applying for an allocation.

HPC advice, assistance and training from PDC

Researchers from business/industry and academia, as well as students, can learn more about using high performance computing for research through PDC’s range of HPC workshops, courses and seminars  that are held throughout the year. Most of these training events (like the Introduction to PDC Systems course ) are free for all participants. There may be fees for a few events, such as some of the training that is given at PDC by independent software vendors (ISVs). The annual PDC Summer School: Introduction to High Performance Computing  also has fees for some categories of participants, though some types of students can attend free.