User Administration

This page provides details on usage reports and how to access them, fees related to the HPC Cluster and sciCORE+, as well as the responsibilities of the team members before leaving sciCORE.

Info

Should you need instructions on how to get an account, olease refer to the “Getting Started” section page.

Usage reports

All sciCORE user groups receive a monthly usage report. These are sent by default as PDFs by email to the PI of the group and can be sent to other designated persons within the group on request.

The reports provide details about the group’s usage of sciCORE storage and compute infrastructure per user and project within the group. Further, these reports also include an analysis of “cluster usage efficiency” - essentially, which fraction of the requested compute time was actively used for computing.

Low efficiency rates generally indicate potential for refactoring of workflows which can reduce costs and increase time to completion of compute jobs. The sciCORE team can provide consulting for these refactoring efforts.

Fees

sciCORE is subsidized by the University of Basel and the SIB (Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics) in the form of partial coverage of hardware costs and salaries of the team.

User fees distribute costs among groups that heavily use the service, encourage responsible use of the resources, and allow contributions to sciCORE services through third party funders. This structure allows sciCORE to provide basic infrastructure, training, and consulting without cost. Only services beyond this baseline are subject to usage fees.

Fees are adjusted occasionally to reflect changing hardware prices and budgetary constraints. As of summer 2025, we are actively re-evaluating user fees for all sciCORE services.

HPC Cluster User Fees

The following fees apply for usage of the sciCORE HPC facility.

The cost model has been approved by the SNF and these user fees should be used in grant applications to account for core facility access cost estimates.

Info

CPU-hour and GPU-hour are counted as the time allocated for these compute resources by the Slurm scheduler.

Usage fees as of 1.1.2024:

Compute Cost

Name	Description	Internal UniBasel¹²	External Academic	External Non-Academic
CPU	CPU-hour² @ <2000000 hour	CHF 0.007 /hour	CHF 0.015 /hour	CHF 0.02 /hour
CPU	CPU-hour² @ >2000000 hour	CHF 0.003 /hour⁷	CHF 0.015 /hour	CHF 0.02 /hour
GPU	GPU-hour (all GPU types)	CHF 0.03 /hour	CHF 0.6 /hour	CHF 3 /hour

Storage Cost

Name	Description	Internal UniBasel ^1,2	external academic	external non-academic
Deep Storage	Offline storage (Deep Storage)	CHF 20 /TB/year⁵	CHF 40 /TB/year⁵
Storage	High Performance storage² <100 TB/year	CHF 50 /TB/year³	CHF 209 /TB/year	CHF 250 /TB/year
Storage	High Performance storage² >100 TB/year	CHF 30 /TB/year^3,4	CHF 209 /TB/year	CHF 250 /TB/year

General conditions

Storage allocation is subject to availability.
Storage cost includes backup.
Storage is assessed per group on a daily basis and charged as a monthly summary.
Billing is on a per-PI / group basis (e.g. professors, core facilities, service units, or similar).
Financial contributions to sciCORE by departmental and/or groups to the shared sciCORE infrastructure pool will be taken into account in billing for the current year. Please contact us ahead of time for planning investments to the sciCORE infrastructure. Depreciation for investments > 100 kCHF will be accounted for during max. 4 consecutive years.
Basic consulting in the usage of the HPC facility (incl. software and databases) as well as initial consulting for scientific projects, is free of charge (see also note 5).

Notes

University of Basel pricing applies to members of the University of Basel and to users at the university hospitals in Basel (USB, UKBB, UPK) for research and teaching purposes. A University of Basel user account (i.e. @unibas.ch e-mail address) is required. In all other cases, fees for External academic collaborators apply.
For University of Basel groups (see also note 1), fees for storage and compute access are subsidized. No invoices are issued for small utilization of IT infrastructure (current threshold: 1‘000 CHF/year, equivalent to ~20 TB storage, ~143 K CPU-hours or ~33 K GPU-hours). These subsidy costs are covered by the sciCORE budget.
Tiered storage is a way to assign different categories of data:
- Tier 1: sciCORE central storage on the cluster or PUMA (network attached storage system).
- Tier 2: For groups requiring higher storage capacity (i.e. more than 100 TB) sciCORE provides storage at reduced costs.
Provisioning of storage is subject to availability of free capacity. For storage requirements of more than 100 TB, please contact us ahead of time for planning infrastructure extensions. In these cases, direct contributions to infrastructure investments are encouraged. For groups requiring higher storage capacity (i.e. more than 100 TB) sciCORE provides storage at reduced costs (Tier 2).
Offline storage (aka Deep Storage) provides a mechanism to store large volumes of data at a cheaper price outside the main storage systems. This infrastructure is not directly connected to computational resources and is expected to have significant access latency. It is meant e.g. to preserve raw scientific data that do not need frequent access after initial processing. Offline storage is hosted by the University central IT-Services, current pricing model is for two copies of 1 TB of data at the indicated CHF/year. To request the transfer of your data to Deep Storage please submit a request in the user space of the sciCORE website.
For larger projects requiring extensive scientific support, programming effort, data analysis, or workflow and software development, these activities can be provided on a “fee for service” basis after mutual agreement between the research group and sciCORE.
For groups requiring more than 2 millions CPU-hours per year, sciCORE provides a backfilling queue with a lower priority. This queue will accept jobs which do not exceed 6 hours of computation time. Please contact us to use the backfilling queue.

sciCORE+ User Fees

The following fees apply for usage of the sciCORE secure infrastructure (for sensitive data).

Usage fees as of 1.6.2022:

Compute Cost

Name	Description	Internal UniBasel¹	External Academic ²
CPU-Memory	Cost per GB of RAM per year³	CHF 2 /GB-year	CHF 4 /GB-year
CPU-core	Cost per CPU core per year³	CHF 60 /core-year	CHF 120 /core-year
GPU-node	Cost per GPU node per year³	CHF 2000 /node-year	CHF 4000 / node-year

Examples

Name	RAM (GB)	Local disk (GB)	vCPUs	RAM/vCPU	Internal UniBasel	External Academic
CPU.medium	4	15	2	2	CHF 128 /year	CHF 256 /year
CPU.large	8	20	4	2	CHF 256 /year	CHF 512 /year
CPU.xlarge	16	100	8	2	CHF 512 /year	CHF 512 /year
CPU.bigmem	256	50	16	16	CHF 1472 /year	CHF 2944 /year
GPU	16	100	8	2	CHF 2000 /year	CHF 4000 /year

Storage Cost

Name	Description	Internal UniBasel¹	External academic²
Storage	High Performance storage <100 TB/year	CHF 75 /TB/year	CHF 150 /TB/year
Storage	High Performance storage >100 TB/year	CHF 40 /TB/year	CHF 150 /TB/year

Support Cost

Name	Description	Internal UniBasel¹	External Academic²
sciCORE(+) project start	Group/tenant setup (<3 days)	CHF 1000 /2 days⁴	CHF 2000 /2 days⁴
Core services	login node, virtual desktop environment, sftp service, slurm, standard software stack	CHF 1000 /year	CHF 2000 /year
Tenant maintenance	Yearly contribution for the tenant maintenance (up to 10 users)	CHF 1000 /year	CHF 2000 /year
Tenant maintenance	Yearly contribution for the tenant maintenance (per extra user)	CHF 100 /user/year	CHF 200 /user/year
Sett configuration (per account)	SPHN Data Transfer Service	CHF 1000 /account	CHF 1000 /account
sciCORE(+) support	Support price (system administrator) per day	CHF 750 /day	CHF 1500 /day

General Conditions

Storage and compute allocation are subject to availability.
Storage cost includes backup.
Storage and compute time is assessed per group and reported in a monthly summary.
Invoices are sent quarterly.
Billing is on a per-project basis.

Notes

Internal Uni Basel pricing applies to research groups and projects conducted at the University of Basel (i.e. research in which the University of Basel is the main umbrella organization). This pricing considers the subsidy of service by the University of Basel.
External academic pricing applies to projects not entitled to the subsidy of the University of Basel. This includes projects by external organizations but hosted in the sciCORE(+) environment. This pricing applies to University Hospitals (USB, UKBB, UPK, …), Swiss TPH, SPHN projects, and projects whose main PI belongs to other academic institutions (universities, FH, ETH).
Computing costs
- Computing costs are calculated pro rata temporis, i.e. the cost of computing resources is calculated based on the amount of time they are actively used.
- CPU
  - Computing costs for general purpose computing nodes (CPU nodes) are based on the effective specifications of the compute node requested, using the following formula:
  - Total computing cost = CPU-core cost + Memory cost
  - The following rates apply (CPU nodes):
    - For University of Basel:
    - CPU-core cost = 60 CHF / core-year
    - Memory (RAM) cost = 2 CHF / GB-year
  - For external academic projects:
    - CPU-core cost = 120 CHF / core-year
    - Memory (RAM) cost = 4 CHF / GB-year
    - GPU
  - Pricing for GPU nodes are:
    - 2000 CHF / node-year (University of Basel)
    - 4000 CHF / node-year (external academic)
Up to 3 days of work, additional time will be charged as sciCORE(+) support

Leaving sciCORE

It is important to be aware of data management responsibilities and processes when a university-associated collaborator leaves the university (i.e. researchers, guest scientists, etc).

Collaborator’s responsibilities before leaving:

Procedure
1. REVIEW - The collaborator should review the data he/she owns on the sciCORE storage systems
2. CLEAN - Delete temporary and unnecessary intermediate files, see “Guidelines for Storage Cleaning”
3. PRESERVE - Transfer research data that need to be preserved eg in the GROUP directory, or in Deep Storage

After the collaborator has left:

Procedure
1. TRANSFER OWNERSHIP - sciCORE transfers ownership of files of the collaborator to the group
2. REVIEW - New owner reviews remaining data, deciding what has to be preserved and deleting the rest
3. PRESERVE - Saves the remaining data of the collaborator (e.g. his/her home directory) by moving to the GROUP directory, or sending to Deep Storage

When a group leader leaves the University of Basel:

There are two main options to be agreed upon between the group leader and their department’s management:

If the group is retired/dismantled:
- The group data are transferred to Deep Storage, and the incurring storage costs will be covered by the University of Basel up to 1‘000 CHF per year
- Costs exceeding 1‘000 CHF per year, will be charged to the corresponding department
- Alternatively, data can be transferred to another active group at the University of Basel
If the PI relocates:
- A contract is established between the group leader and the university of Basel guaranteeing that the data generated at University of Basel will remain accessible under the conditions of the Research Integrity in the new organization

Warning

If a group leaves the University without clarifying the end-of-life data management process, the default procedure is to transfer data to Deep Storage with storage costs covered by the University of Basel up to 1‘000 CHF per year. Costs exceeding 1‘000 CHF per year will be charged to the corresponding department. Data in deep storage will be deleted 5 years after upload unless an alternative end date is communicated by the department.

Note

A request to delete a research group directory earlier than the 5 years period required by the integrity policy must be approved (signed) by the Head of the Department (or its Geschäftsführer).