Annualized cost of services for fiscal year 21/22

IT's mission has always been to help the KAUST community. Research Computing, inside IT, is geared towards KAUST's researchers. We always provided centrally funded resources to researchers for free, e.g. Noor HPC clusters, OpenStack virtualization platform, Remote Scientific Workstations, DataWaha, just to mention a few. We will continue in this tradition even when these hard times have put stress on our budgets. We published the unit costs to create a baseline that we will reference in the annual budget allocation process and provide other options to acquire additional capacity out of the standard budget cycle. IT will not charge for the services below unless you reach out to us in the middle of the fiscal year asking for amounts of resources, we do not have handy, and your request cannot wait to be addressed by the standard budget cycle. That is when we might ask you to participate in part of the cost to procure these new resources.

The figures below are provided for your orientation. We are revising our plans and roadmaps for FY 22/23 and beyond. Further updates will be communicated soon through the standard channels.

  • Remote Scientific Workstations
    • $300 per user/year
  • BinderHub
    • $150 per user/year
    • 4vCPU, 16GB RAM, 10GB persistent storage
    • You can add more vCPU and/or RAM in increments of 4 for VCPU and 16GB for RAM
      Workshop prices
    • $20 per user/day
    • 2vCPU, 4GB RAM, 10GB persistent storage
    • You can add more vCPU and/or RAM in increments of 4 for VCPU and 16GB for RAM
      Community Edition
    • Free (max 20 concurrent users)
    • 1vCPU, 2GB RAM, 10GB persistent storage
    • You can add more vCPU and/or RAM in increments of 4 for VCPU and 16GB for RAM
  • JupyterHub
    • $150 per user/year
    • 4vCPU, 16GB RAM, 10GB persistent storage
    • You can access Noor HOME, DataWaha, Shaheen
    • You can add more vCPU and/or RAM in increments of 4 for VCPU and 16GB for RAM
  • RStudio
    • $300 per user/year
    • 4vCPU, 16GB RAM, 10GB persistent storage
    • You can access Noor HOME, DataWaha, Shaheen
    • You can add more vCPU and/or RAM in increments of 4 for VCPU and 16GB for RAM
  • Running containers on Kubernetes
    • $120 pod/year
    • $240 DB pod/year (includes backup)
  • Virtual Servers for Research
    • Please contact Research Computing for the cost structure
  • DataWaha
    • Please contact Research Computing for the cost structure