Cloud Storage & Compute

What is SDSC Cloud Storage and Compute?

The SDSC Research Data Services (RDS) team administers one of the first large-scale academic deployments of cloud storage in the world. UC San Diego campus users, members of the UC community, and UC affiliates are eligible to join the hundreds of users who already benefit from the 3 petabytes of raw space, which is organized into object-based cloud storage by OpenStack’s Swift platform.

SDSC Cloud Storage is the perfect storage choice for researchers with fixed budgets because unlike other cloud providers, SDSC features a simplified recharge plan that eliminates secondary fees such as bandwidth costs, charges assessed per request, and regional migration fees.

Advantages of SDSC Cloud include:

Collaboration - effortlessly share cloud data with colleagues or the public
Redundancy - with three copies of each file distributed across multiple internal racks, rest assured that your data is reasonably safe from the perils of normal hardware exhaustion
Technical Support - communicate directly with SDSC Cloud Storage engineers, who enjoy using their extensive experience to assist you

In addition to storage, SDSC Cloud now includes compute options. Users can spin up instances on demand. Email services@sdsc.edu for more information.

Note: SDSC offers a separate cloud storage system for data that needs to meet PHI/PII or HIPAA compliance. Explore SHERLOCK for secure solutions.

How Much Does SDSC Cloud Storage and Compute Cost?

Service	Unit	UC Rate	External Rate
Cloud Storage Minimum allocation 1 TB; billed monthly storage use is averaged by monitoring space used hourly	TB/month	$32.16/TB/month	$46.632/TB/month
Cloud Compute SU's represent resource usage per hour	Hour	$0.08/SU	$0.116/SU

Recharge rates are subject to change with approval from the UC San Diego Recharge Rate Committee. IDC is exempt for UC San Diego users of SDSC Cloud, effective October 10, 2017.When developing budgets for new research proposals, if the eligible cloud computing services are associated with the extramurally funded research, please include these costs in the modifications made to calculate the modified total direct costs (MTDC) so that IDC costs are not added to the proposed budget. Read more about MTDC. Please see https://blink.ucsd.edu/technology/cloud/indirect-cost-exemption.html for more details.

SDSC Cloud Compute Additional Cost Details

Cloud compute is billed by hours of use of each instance. SDSC Cloud Compute On-Demand pricing is $0.0314/vCPU/hour and $0.0007/GB of memory/hour. More powerful instances or instances with increased storage cost more to run.

Instance Prices

Instance Name	vCPU Count	Memory Count (GB)	System Disk (GB)	UC Recharge Rate ($/hour)	External Recharge Rate ($/hour)
m1.medium	1	4	20	$0.0342	$0.1026
m1.large	2	8	20	$0.0684	$0.2052
m1.xlarge	4	16	20	$0.1368	$0.4104
m1.2xlarge	8	32	20	$0.2736	$0.8208
c1.large	2	4	20	$0.0656	$0.1968
c1.xlarge	4	8	20	$0.1312	$0.3936
c1.2xlarge	8	16	20	$0.2624	$0.7872
r1.large	2	16	20	$0.0740	$0.2220
r1.xlarge	4	32	20	$0.1480	$0.4440
r1.2xlarge	8	64	20	$0.2960	$0.8880

Instance Storage Prices

20 GB of ephemeral disk storage is provided with each instance at no additional cost. Additional storage for images, volumes, snapshots and instances that boot from volume will be charged.

Type	UC Recharge Rate	External Recharge Rate
Volume and Volume Snapshot	$0.000063/GB/hour	$0.00009135/GB/hour
Image	$0.000063/GB/hour	$0.00009135/GB/hour

Recharge rates are subject to change with approval from the UC San Diego Recharge Rate Committee. Normal IDC rules apply.

How Do I Get SDSC Cloud Storage and Compute?

Send a request to the SDSC Research Data Services team at services@sdsc.edu.

Where Can I Get Support for SDSC Cloud Storage and Compute?

Answers to common questions can be found in the support section of this site:

Questions can also be submitted to SDSC storage engineers by emailing support@sdsc.edu.