The Faculty Owned Equipment (FOE) service supports researchers with grants that require the purchase of computing hardware. FOE allows researchers to place their own hardware within an HPC cluster. Most FOE hardware is hosted in the cluster Lighthouse, but may be hosted in other clusters.

To use FOE at ARC-TS, we require researchers:

  1. coordinate with ARC-TS to including hardware in a proposal or purchasing hardware prior to working with vendors;
  2. purchase hardware that is compatible with the rest of the cluster installation where the hardware will be running;
  3. obtain a subscription to FOE for each compute node.

A subscription to FOE provides access to the HPC infrastructure  — data center, staff, networking, storage and basic software — except the compute hardware.

FOE is available for:

  1. Researchers who receive funds from external funding agencies for purchasing equipment.
  2. Researchers who have workflow and/or infrastructure needs that differ significantly from those that can be met by other HPC services (i.e. Standard-Memory, Larger-Memory or GPU Flux allocations).

FOE on Lighthouse

The hardware added to Lighthouse is for the exclusive use of the research group that added it and will not be part of the general HPC node pool.

FOE on Great Lakes or Armis2

If the hardware is added to Great Lakes or Armis2 to be used in conjunction with the rest of the cluster, then the Slurm account will have a ‘spending limit’ of 80% of the capacity of the purchased resources based on the current rates.  This account can submit work to any partition on the cluster and the job charges will go against that ‘spending limit.’  Additionally, we will set a usage limit that is greater than the purchased hardware, allowing you to burst as your research needs require.

Budgeting for the Faculty Owned Equipment

The FOE subscription rate and node purchase charges allow for funding from a range of sources: federally funded research projects; general funds; departmental instructional funds; faculty discretionary and research incentive accounts; cost-sharing funds; and faculty start-up or retention package funds. All FOE purchase and subscription costs are charged to a U-M shortcode; no other payment method (cash, credit cards, etc.) is accepted.  The costs are determined by the FOE rate that applies to the purchasing researcher and the number and price of the compute nodes being added.  FOE use is billed monthly by ITS. The details of the FOE charges will appear on the normal monthly Statement of Activity.

Hardware purchases for FOE are a one-time expense.  If made from federal funds, the timing of the purchase relative to the end of the grant period must be consistent with federal regulations.  FOE subscription charges are a recurring expense.  If made from federal funds, subscription charges can not be prepaid to extend beyond the end of the grant period.

Order Service

The rate for an FOE subscription can be found on the ARC rates page.

As long as the subscription charges for FOE are paid, compute nodes will be maintained in the Flux Operating Environment until they are 4 years old. Keeping nodes older than 4 years in the Flux Operating Environment will be at the discretion of Advanced Research Computing – Technology Services (ARC-TS) and will not be run beyond 6 years.

The subscription rate has been set by ARC and approved by the U-M’s Office of Financial Analysis (OFA) and may be charged to federal grants. The hardware purchase price will be finalized at the time of purchase and will be processed by U-M purchasing.

To order Service:

Email arcts-support@umich.edu

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