[I'm forwarding a message David Bhella sent me as a follow up to the community meeting. I think this is a practical issue for many people, so comments welcome.]
Hi Martyn
Further to last weeks meetings discussion of clusters, there was interest in the cost of our cluster support so I thought I would let you know the cost of this support.
We paid £8300 for hardware and software installation and training plus one years support to Alces.
To continue with the support we pay ~£2.5k per year.
For this we get email and telephone support, they have also taken care of warranty hardware issues for us. If we want software installed we just ask them.
I look after user management and I also did do some work on the parallelisation of my icosahedral reconstruction software which involved writing some scripts to divide jobs up and submit them to SGE. However if software natively integrates with systems such as openMPI or SGE then they will take care of installing it and ensuring that it works.
Overall I was really happy with the software stack they installed and can provide a detailed description of the system to anyone interested.
D.
Dr David Bhella
MRC - University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research
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