Account charges
Principal Investigators can view their bills and list of their users on the WIN Registration Page.
For questions about IT billing, or to make changes to your current bills, please email admin@win.ox.ac.uk
IT Charging Policy
A flat fee charging model is now in place. The charges are:
£125 per month (£1500 pa) for a normal account
£17.50 per month (£210 pa) for a low usage account
In addition there are free accounts for users that only need to download data.
There are no charges based on compute time.
Low usage accounts have no access to the cluster and are allocated 10GB of storage space.
Normal accounts have full access to the cluster and begin with 100GB of scratch space and 10GB of space in the home directory. These can be extended without extra charge (with justification) to 200GB of scratch quota and 20GB home quota on request.
Additional disk charges will be incurred for space beyond the normal account allocation in the home and /vols/Data spaces.
| Period | Cost per TB per year |
|---|---|
| 08/2023 - 07/2024 | £39 |
| 08/2022 - 07/2023 | £57 |
|
Prior to 07/2022 |
£50 |
We are happy to allocate space in smaller blocks than 1TB.
For avoidance of confusion, 1TB = 1000GB = 1000KB - reported space on our servers is typically of the form 1TiB = 1024GiB = 1024KiB.
Where your project has been approved for migration to our new BMRC hosted cluster service, storage is charged at the rate of £71.59* per TB pa. This storage has no backup so you are recommended to also purchase space on WIN's service to allow you to backup results and important data. Purchase of this storage space is direct with BMRC.
* Until at least end-June 2024 there are restrictions on the proportion of this fee that Wellcome, NIH and EUH2020 are willing to fund out of this charge. BMRC can provide details on the proportion that can be funded from these grants. Any shortfall (at present) must be made up by your department.
Old Charging Policy (pre August 2017)
FMRIB IT has a pay-by-usage charging model. Details on how this system operates are provided on this page.
CHARGES FOR JANUARY-DECEMBER 2014
| Low Usage Account Charge £/pa (pro rata) | Normal Account Charge £/pa (pro rata) | Compute Charge £/h | Disk Charge £ per GB per month | | |
| | | | Allocated Unused | Unprotected (Scratch) | Protected |
| 100 | 1000 | 0.03 | 0.02 | 0.04 | 0.10 |
CHARGING DETAILS
ACCOUNT CHARGE
All accounts will be subject to a service provision charge based on the number of accounts active in the previous year and the budgeted costs for running the computing facilities:
- (Intended) Hardware Purchases - four year amortisation period
- Staff costs
- Third-party support costs (not disk/cluster related)
- Third-party Service rental costs
- Software licensing (not disk/cluster related)
Where an account is deemed to be a low usage account (less than ten gigabytes of disk allocation, less than one hour of compute usage) this fee will be capped at £100. The charge is pro rata, for example an account active for 6 months would pay 50% of the charge (i.e. £500 or £50 depending on usage).
DISK USAGE RENTAL FEE
All accounts will be subject to a disk usage rental fee to cover the costs of providing data storage:
- (Intended) Hardware Purchases - four year amortisation period
- Tape purchase
- Software licensing
- Third-party support costs
This charge comprises of the following:
- A low charge for disk space of any type allocated but unused
- A medium charge for disk space used but unprotected by our data backup systems (scratch folder)
- A higher charge for disk space used in one of the tape backup protected areas (home folders and /vols/Data)
CLUSTER USAGE CHARGES
Where an account uses the compute cluster a charge will be levied on the cpu time used in the charging period for standard jobs, and on the wall time for interactive tasks.
COMPUTING CHARGING ESTIMATION
For the purposes of grant preparation we have analysed the usage data collected in 2013 and have calculated the following median per user charges for an account which passes the low-use threshold figures (>10GB disk usage and >1h cluster time). By definition, there are many researchers whose usage exceeds these median values, and hence we would not recommend in general budgeting simply according to the medians, as this would result in higher-usage researchers running short on IT funds.
| User Type | Median Cluster Charge p.a. (SD) | Median Disk Charge p.a. (SD) |
| Post Doc | £41.20 (477.79) | £31.33 (89.97) |
| Student | £35.24 (557.74) | £24.21 (68.37) |
| Collaborator | £14.84 (230.14) | £19.11 (46.81) |
These accounts are also subject to a £1000 p.a. standing charge.