National University of Singapore

About the Service

Computer Centre introduced two new HPC services, the Pay-Per-Use and the Condominium services, in early 2012 to enable a more productive use of HPC resources for research.

The Pay-Per-Use service is based on the private cloud model where HPC cluster resources can be subscribed and provisioned on-demand through a service portal. The Pay-Per-Use facility is designed to provision up to 16 cluster nodes (with 192 processor cores) within a day. Larger cluster can be provisioned within a longer time, where the turnaround time will depend on the size of the request.

The Condominium service is based on the managed service model where the subscriber will have dedicated used of the subscribed HPC cluster for a period of 3 years or 5 years. Just like owning a condominium apartment, the supplier, in this case Computer Centre, will be the one building, operating and maintaining the subscribed system.

Both the Pay-Per-Use and Condominium services offer researchers a hassle-free option to acquire dedicated HPC resources for their work. While the Pay-Per-Use service enable researchers to get resources as and when they need them and pay for only what they have used, the Condominium service guarantees dedicated use of a fixed pool of resources for a period of 3 years or 5 years. Compared to an individual HPC procurement process, both services have the potential of cutting the typical procurement and installation turnaround time of more than 3 months to just days. With the new services, researchers will also be freed from the mundane work of operating and maintaining their own system.

In general the subscription rates for the two services provided by Computer Centre are lower than the equivalent public cloud services available out there. To make it even more attractive to NUS researchers, a special subsidized rate will be offered to NUS departments/RIs/RCs. Researchers who are interested may contact the HPC team at for a quotation.