Overview for new PIs and users

The JHPCE cluster is a Linux based HPC environment, and is designed for running loosely coupled parallelizable jobs, or programs needing large amounts of CPUs, RAM, or disk space. We have a number of genomics and statistical tools installed on the cluster, but most of the analysis is done using programs written in languages like R, python, Stata, or SAS.

The JHPCE Cluster operates as a non-profit service center run out of the Biostats department of the Bloomberg JHU Bloomberg School of Public Health. As such we do charge fairly nominal fees for compute and storage, and all users on the cluster need to have a sponsoring PI that will fund their usage.

Information for New Sponsoring PIs

As mentioned above, we do operate as a non-profit JHU Service Center, and do charge for compute and storage usage on the cluster.

Compute Charges

Our fees for compute time are roughly 1 penny per hour for a job using 1 core and 5GB of RAM. Costs scale linearly with time and cpu+mem usage, so a job running for 24 hours that used 8 cores and 40GB of RAM would cost about $2.00.

Storage Charges

Costs for storage are broken into home directory storage and project storage space.
1. Home directory Storage: All users are given a personal home directory with a 100GB quota. For home directory space, we charge $0.45 per GB per year, so this cost would max out at $45 for a year if a user used their entire 100GB of space.
2. Project Storage: If you need several TB of space for storing large amounts of data, you can purchase an allocation on one of our large storage arrays. Every 12 months or so we purchase a new large storage array for the JHPCE cluster, and sell allocations on that array. The cost for an allocation will be based on the actual cost of the storage, but has been decreasing over time. Our latest storage build worked out to be about $30 per TB per year. There is typically a 10TB minimum buy-in for new storage purchases.

We have more information about becoming a Sponsoring PI as both a Stakeholder and Non-Stakeholder at New PI Page If this sounds like a good fit for your lab, then the first step in accessing the cluster would be for you or someone on your team to complete the New Project form. This will help us gather the relevant contact and financial information for your lab.

Information for New Users

Once the New Project form is completed, the Project will be added as a Sponsoring Organization on the New Users form at which point the members of your team that will be performing the analysis can sign up for a user account. Once the New User form is completed, an email will be sent to the requestor with some introductory information about the cluster, as well as a link to sign up for an upcoming JHPCE Orientation Session.

Orientation

All new users are required to attend one of our JHPCE Orientation Sessions, during which their account will be set up on the cluster. The Orientation is typically held every other Wednesday afternoon, and lasts for about 2 hours. Prior to attending the orientation, you should review the What to do before attending the orientation session page. The slides for the orientation can be found here