Value Delivered
What it would have cost to rent this compute instead of owning it.
Data freshness unknown
Read this before quoting the number
This is the figure most likely to be challenged, so here is exactly what it is and is not.
What it is. Allocated GPU-hours multiplied by a public on-demand hourly rate, summed. Nothing else.
It is an estimate, not a measurement, and here is the specific reason.
Slurm’s accounting on this cluster records that a job used a GPU, but not
which model of GPU — AccountingStorageTRES tracks gres/gpu with no
per-model breakdown. So the exact calculation, GPU-hours per model times that
model’s rate, cannot be performed from the data we have. Instead each period’s
GPU-hours are priced at the average rate of the fleet installed in that
period, weighted by how many of each model were in service. The 2023 figure
is therefore priced against a mostly-A40 cluster and the 2026 figure against
one where H200s dominate, which is why the effective rate rises over time.
That assumption — that demand is spread across models in proportion to how many are installed — is certainly not exactly true. The newest cards are the most contended, so this most likely understates. It is published as an estimate rather than withheld because a rough figure with its method stated is more useful than no figure at all.
What it is not. It is not a budget, a saving that appears in any ledger, or a claim that the same work would have been purchased at list price. Anyone running this volume in the cloud would negotiate committed-use discounts, use spot capacity, or restructure the work — all of which would lower the bill substantially.
What it leaves out in the other direction. It excludes the staff, facilities, power, cooling, and networking that make the cluster run, and it excludes the data-transfer charges that dominate real cloud bills for research workloads. It is a comparison of compute rental rates, not a total cost of ownership analysis.
The rate table, its source, and the date it was retrieved are printed below and versioned in the repository. The site refuses to display a dollar figure at all unless a source and an as-of date are recorded alongside the rates.