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Costs for AWS do not include data storage, networking, VPN/transit, data ingress/egress, or any other charges aside from the EC2 instance price. The code calculates cost as per-second even if the job ran for less than one hour, and assumes that since an Amazon VCPU is half a core, a job will take twice as long on Amazon as on Sol.

Accounts

A Principal Investigator can request accounts for his/her users for $50/user/year. Each account is provided with 150GB home storage quota. Every user will need to have an active allocation to use Sol. Sharing of accounts is explicitly forbidden and will result in forfeiture of accounts.

If additional storage is required, a PI can purchase a Ceph Storage project for his/her group based on a 5 year purchase. PIs who purchase a Ceph Storage project, minimum $375/TB, can opt for using their Ceph space for home directories and have their account fees waived for the life of the Ceph project. 

Allocations

Principal Investigators, who are not Condo Investors, called Hotel Investors henceforth, will be able to purchase computing time, if available, on an annual basis. Computing time equivalent to 8 20-core compute nodes or 1,400,000 SUs is available for general use on an annual basis. The cost per SU is fixed at 1¢ with a minimum annual buy-in of 50,000 SUs with increments of 10,000 SUs.

1. Minimum Annual Allocation (50K SUs): $500

2. 10K Increments: $100

The allocation cycle is fixed at one year and unused allocations (the minimum and any increments purchased during that cycle) will not rollover to the next allocation cycle nor be refunded. The initial allocation cycle will begin on Oct 1, 2016 and end on Sep. 30, 2017. Implementing a rolling allocation cycle for Hotel Investors i.e. allocation cycle begins the day you initiated a purchase rather than a rigid start date (Oct 1.) is a work in progress.

Condo Investors who utilize their allocated cycles before the cycle ends can purchase additional 10K increments, if available, and are not subject to the minimum allocation purchase. However, any 10K increments purchased must be expended before the next allocation cycle begins. There are no refunds or rollovers of SUs from one allocation cycle to the next.

For example, a PI who estimates requiring 75K SUs annually will need to purchase 80K SUs for $800 annually. Suppose the PI only consumes 60K SUs during the allocation cycle, the unused 20K SUs will not rollover to the next allocation cycle, nor will the PI be reimbursed for the unused SUs. Alternatively, the PI can purchase the minimum 50K SUs for $500 and purchase additional increments of 10K whenever his/her allocation balance is low. The PI should consider that the availability of 10K increments for purchase is not guaranteed.

Revised policy for Accounts & Allocations

Logging into Sol

Sol can be accessed via SSH using a SSH Client. Linux and Mac users can login to Sol by entering the following command in a terminal:

ssh username@sol.cc.lehigh.edu

If you are off campus, then there are two options

1. Start a vpn session and then login to Sol using the ssh command above
2. Use ssh gateway as a jump host first and then login to Sol using the above ssh command on the ssh gateway prompt. If your ssh is from the latest version of openssh, then you can use the following command

ssh -J username@ssh.cc.lehigh.edu username@sol.cc.lehigh.edu

If you are using the ssh gateway, you might want to add the following to your ${HOME}/.ssh/config file on your local system

  Host *ssh
  HostName ssh.cc.lehigh.edu
  Port 22
# This is an example - replace alp514 with your Lehigh ID
  User alp514

  Host *sol
  HostName sol.cc.lehigh.edu
  Port 22
  User <LehighID>
  ProxyCommand ssh ssh nc %h %p

to simplify the ssh and scp (for file transfer) command. You will be prompted for your password twice - first for ssh and then for sol

ssh sol
scp sol:<path to source directory>/filename <path to destination directory>/filename 

If you are using public key authentication, please add a passphrase to your key. Passwordless authentication is a security risk. Use ssh-agent and ssh-add to manage your public keys. See https://kb.iu.edu/d/aeww for details.

Windows users will need to install a SSH Client to access Sol. Lehigh Research Computing recommends MobaXterm since it can be configured to use the SSH Gateway as jump host. DUO Authentication is activated for faculty and staff on the SSH Gateway. If a window pops up for password enter your Lehigh password. The second pop up is for DUO, it only says DUO Login. Enter 1 for Push to DUO or 2 for call to registered phone.