Why Purchase Resources?
Koa is free to use for all students, faculty and staff at any of the campuses in the University of Hawaii system.
While a significant amount of work can be completed using free community resources, some researchers may find that they need more storage or dedicated resources to run longer jobs than the community nodes allow or they find the wait times for community resources to significantly impede their research.
Faculty and staff can purchase or lease compute nodes to power their research and select a long term storage solution for their data.
Computational resources
Researchers have the options of purchasing or leasing computational resources on Koa. Both options provide the following benefits:
A private scheduler partition
Priority access to those that have been granted access to the lab private partition
Private partition jobs will have immediate access compared to community users
Maximum of a 30 day job run time
Purchasing computational resources (hardware)
When purchasing resources to add to Koa, researchers are able to choose from a set of pre-configured systems that the Information Technology Services Cyberinfrastructure (ITS-CI) team have curated and acquired estimated pricing for.
In some cases, these systems may not meet a researchers specific needs. In this case, the ITS-CI team is will to work with the researcher to try and configure something custom that will work with Koa and work for the researcher.
Purchasing computational resources has two different fiscal components to it. The majority of the cost is classified as equipment, while a small amount of the cost will be classified as a service. The hardware being purchased in not something unique to Koa, allowing researchers the freedom to utilize the hardware outside of Koa after it is used on Koa if they so choose, but the service fee we charge is used to pay for the use of the small amount of networking ports, cables, and data center infrastructure your need would need to live 5 years as part of Koa. Computational resources purchased by a research currently would have three different options once it has been part of Koa for 5 years. The end of option options of Pay to Stay, Donation, and Removal are described here: Computational Resources End of Life
This full purchasing process for nodes on Koa can be found here: Node purchasing process, and the node purchasing intent form can be found here: Node purchasing intent form.