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About

  • Unity Account Expiration and Deletion Policy
  • Unity Facilities Boilerplate
  • Unity Security Statement
  • Unity Terms of Service

Unity Open Access & Open Hardware Rates

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This page is institution-specific
The information below applies to UMass Amherst, UMass Boston, UMass Lowell, and Mount Holyoke College. For inquiries regarding other institutions, including UMass Dartmouth and the University of Rhode Island, contact your institution’s representative.

Standard Unity access and resources

All research groups receive a standard storage allocation and compute access as part of their institution’s Unity membership, at no cost to the researcher.

Standard storage allocations

Each research group receives access to storage, including:

  • A 50 GB home directory for each group member.
  • 1 TB of high performance work storage, located at /work/<group name>.
  • Up to 5 TB of project storage, located at /project/<group name>.
  • Access to temporary, high performance scratch space.

Standard compute access

Research groups can use the general access partitions, including cpu, cpu-preempt, gpu, and gpu-preempt. Each research group is restricted to using 1000 simultaneous CPU cores or 64 simultaneous GPUs. However, there is no total core-hour or gpu-hour usage cap. At this time, this restriction does not apply to the preempt partitions. For information about submitting workloads to compute nodes, see our Slurm job scheduler documentation. Note that availability of resources is subject to cluster load and immediate access is not guaranteed.

In addition, all Unity users can access the Unity OnDemand portal, a web-based, graphical interface where users can access graphical applications; like JupyterLab, RStudio, and Matlab; and a graphical XFCE desktop.

Research group management

Upon account creation, we generate a unique group for each eligible researcher, usually in the form pi_<lead researcher's Unity username>. Group owners can manage access for an unlimited number of group members, including students and research staff, through the Unity portal.

Purchasing additional resources

Research groups requiring resources beyond the institution-sponsored resources can purchase additional compute or storage capacity. If you’re unsure whether your project requires or would benefit from purchasing additional resources, please email hpc@umass.edu. For grant submissions, please email hpc@umass.edu for a copy of our facilities boilerplate.

Additional storage

Unity provides two expandable storage platforms: NESE-hosted /project directories and VAST-based /work directories.

PlatformPrice per TB per monthPurchase IncrementMinimum DurationMaximum Duration
/project$4.715 TB1 year5 years
/work$30.001 TB6 months2 years

Priority compute access

Unity provides three avenues for purchasing priority compute: priority compute core or GPU hours, node leasing, and Unity Open Hardware node purchasing.

Priority compute hours

Purchasing priority compute access offers research groups either priority access to resources or access beyond the group’s resource cap.

stylus_note
Priority access is subject to cluster load and is not equivalent to immediate or preemptable access.
Resource typeCost per core- or gpu-hourNotes
CPU$0.014128GB RAM per CPU core
GPU$0.25 and upCost depends on GPU type, email hpc@umass.edu with inquiries

Node leasing

Research groups can lease nodes from six months to up to five years at a 50% discount over purchasing priority compute hours. The cost assumes 100% utilization over the duration of the lease. Research groups leasing nodes get priority access to leased nodes, subject to a two-hour grace period for preemptable jobs running on the node.

Example node typeCost per core- or gpu-hourCost per year
CPU (128 core)$0.00706$7,921.66
GPU$0.125 and up$1,095 and up

Unity Open Hardware purchasing

Research groups with substantial or specific computational needs can also purchase hardware to add to Unity. Unity Open Hardware owners get priority access to their hardware. However, all purchased hardware is added to the cpu-preempt or gpu-preempt partitions for use by all Unity users. Priority jobs supersede jobs in the preempt partitions following a two-hour grace period.

All Open Hardware purchases must be approved by the Unity leadership team in advance and are subject to hardware type restrictions. To discuss a hardware purchase for your research group, contact hpc@umass.edu.

University of Massachusetts Amherst University of Massachusetts Amherst University of Rhode Island University of Rhode Island University of Massachusetts Dartmouth University of Massachusetts Dartmouth University of Massachusetts Lowell University of Massachusetts Lowell University of Massachusetts Boston University of Massachusetts Boston Mount Holyoke College Mount Holyoke College Smith College Smith College
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