Introduction
SLAC supports centralized support for its scientific computing hardware, and provides a discount to its users to encourage use of those centralized services. These include all steps involved in procurement, installation, hosting and maintenance of fileserver and compute clusters.
Principles
A grounds-up determination of effort required versus different hardware configurations was done, then simplified to represent a base cost per cluster plus a scaling cost per element of the cluster. Currently we envisage hardware snapshots to be taken twice a year to capture the evolving customer charges.
Services outside the standard list would require extra effort and direct charges to the customer. This document describes the standard services and charges for them.