Pricing overview
AWS Parallel Computing Service (AWS PCS) is a managed service for running high performance computing (HPC) and scientific and engineering modeling workloads on AWS. Usage of AWS PCS will incur two separate charges—an hourly cluster controller fee and an hourly node management fee for every Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance launched within your AWS PCS compute node groups. The controller fee will vary by the controller size chosen to manage the cluster. The node management fee is tiered—an advanced tier for Amazon EC2 UltraCluster instance types (P and TRN instance families) and a standard tier for all other Amazon EC2 instance types. Both fees are rounded up to the nearest minute. You only pay for what you use, as you use it.
In addition to the AWS PCS service fees, you will be billed separately for all the AWS resources used by your cluster. For example, you will be charged for Amazon EC2 instances used across your cluster as well as for applicable data transfer charges. For more information, visit the Amazon EC2 pricing page.
AWS PCS controller sizes for Slurm
When creating a PCS cluster, you will be asked to select a controller size and can choose based on the cluster-level requirements outlined below. If your workload requirements are greater than the Large size offers, contact us here. To know more about choosing the right cluster size, refer here.
| Slurm Controller Size | Number of Instances Orchestrated | Number of Active & Queued Jobs |
Small |
Up to 32 |
Up to 256 |
Medium |
Up to 512 |
Up to 8,192 |
Large |
Up to 2,048 |
Up to 16,384 |
AWS PCS Fees - Pricing
Pricing examples
Example 1: Running an Always On cluster in US East (N. Virginia)
Let’s say you run a 500-instance high performance computing (HPC) cluster 24/7 for a month, provision 2 compute node groups to scale up instances across the C, HPC, and R instance families, and plan to run and queue a maximum of 800 jobs at any point in time to meet your workload needs in the US East (N. Virginia) AWS Region. You choose to deploy a Medium size AWS PCS controller. In one month, your bill will be:
Controller fee charges: $3.2579/hour * 24 hours/day * 30 days/month = $2,345.688
Node management fee charges: 500 instances * $0.08/instance/hour * 24 hours/day * 30 days/month = $28,800.00
Total monthly bill: Controller fee charges + node management fee charges = $31,145.688
Note: AWS PCS charges are in addition to compute, storage, and other underlying resources used.
Example 2: Running a spiky daily workload in US East (N. Virginia)
Let’s say you run an HPC workload spanning 5 jobs that run for 2 hours a day, 5 days a week, every week in the US East (N. Virginia) Region. The workloads are spiky and run a maximum of 400 instances but on average run 200 instances of which 10 are in the P or TRN families. You choose to deploy a Medium size AWS PCS cluster. In one month, your bill will be:
Controller fee charges: $3.2579/hour * 2 hours/day * 5 days/week * 4 weeks/month = $130.316
(Standard) Node management fee charges: 190 instances * $0.08/instance/hour * 2 hours/day * 5 days/week * 4 weeks/month = $608.00
(Advanced) Node management fee charges: 10 P instances * $0.64/instance/hour * 2 hours/day * 5 days/week * 4 weeks/month = $256.00
Total monthly bill: Controller fee charges + node management fee charges = $994.316
Note: AWS PCS charges are in addition to compute, storage, and other underlying resources used.