Draft for review. This page is under review before the Operational Readiness Review. Panels marked as open questions are still waiting for an answer. Send corrections to the Research Platform team. |
Read time: 4 minutes. Short version: your project pays with its own funding. You pay for the time your machines run, and for the storage you use. Nothing else. Nothing stops you automatically yet — watch your budget. |
The project pays, from its own funding. The Research Platform does not give you a separate pot of money. Your project brings its funding, and its members spend against it.
The project admin shares that money out across the team. See RPAdmin — the admin console.
All work on the platform runs in containers. (A container is a packaged, running copy of your workspace software.) You pay for the time a container is running. Nothing more.
This covers:
| What you start | You pay while… |
|---|---|
| Your notebook workspace | the notebook is running |
| A Dask cluster (many machines for one job) | the cluster is up |
| A background job (a notebook that runs on its own) | the job is running |
When the container stops, the charge stops. So: stop your notebook when you finish for the day. Shut down a Dask cluster as soon as the job is done. This is the single biggest thing you can do to control your cost.
You pay for the space you actually hold in three places:
| Storage | What it is |
|---|---|
| EFS | The shared filesystem for your project |
| EBS | Your own private workspace disk |
| S3 | Cloud object storage for large data |
One important exception: if the S3 storage sits in a remote AWS account — your institution's account, or a mission's account — the Research Platform does not charge you for it. That account's owner pays for it, the same as before.
There is no platform fee and no support fee today. The team is evaluating whether to add one. This page will say so if that changes.
There is a small free allocation for a new project, so you can try the platform. The exact amount is still to be defined. Ask the Science Cloud team for the current figure.
Today the platform does not stop you. Budgets are tracked and shown, but a workspace still starts when the money is spent. So watch the numbers.
What the platform does do today:
A hard stop at launch is planned work, not live yet:
Until that ships, budget control is by watching and talking, not by the system saying no.
OPEN — Danl to answer. The question for him is: "How does funding actually reach a project's budget in RPAdmin? Who enters the dollar amount, and what is it based on — a WBS number, a purchase, a funds transfer, or something else? What paperwork does a project admin need before the number can be entered, and how does the project admin add more money later?" Do not publish this section until Danl answers. |