Compute costs

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is used as the underlying your cloud provider and its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances are used to perform computation tasks. Seven Bridges passes through compute instance costs for accessing the cloud services through the Platform.

The following table shows the compute services and charging units:

Compute Costs: Amazon Web Services

The Platform performs computation tasks using Amazon EC2 virtual computing environments, known as instances. There are various types of instances that have different configurations of CPU, memory, storage and networking capacity. See the list of AWS instances used on the Platform on AWS US East and AWS US West and AWS EU.

AWS charges for the use of their compute instances on a per second basis, but the rate depends on the AWS pricing model. The Platform uses two AWS pricing models:

• On-Demand: you pay for compute capacity at a fixed hourly rate.
• Spot: the hourly rate is dictated by the market (supply and demand) for AWS EC2 spare compute capacity.

All public workflows on the Platform are set up to use instances that offer the optimal ratio of On-Demand price and compute power, while you are also able to perform optimization for your applications that you want to use on the Seven Bridges Platform.

Amazon EC2 On-Demand instances

The rate of On-Demand instances depends on the instance type used and is shown in the following price list (select US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon) or Europe (Frankfurt) from the Region dropdown menu based on the region where your project is created or where you run the Seven Bridges Platform). AWS expresses all rates per hour, but the calculation of the price is done on a per-second basis: the per-hour price is divided by 3600 and then multiplied by the actual number of seconds the instance was running.

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances

When your task runs using Spot Instances, you get charged the current market price for that instance for the time period the instance was running. AWS expresses all rates per hour, but the calculation of the price is done on a per-second basis: the per-hour price is divided by 3600 and then multiplied by the actual number of seconds the instance was running.

The maximum hourly price that you will be charged for an instance is the bid price of that instance. Because the bid price used by the Platform is the On-Demand price for that particular instance, you will never pay more than the On-Demand hourly rate for an instance you're using.

If the market price of a Spot Instance you're using exceeds the bid price (i.e. the On-Demand price for that instance type), the Spot Instance is terminated and the the task will continue running on an On-Demand instance. If spot instance termination occurs during the first hour of running the task on the instance, you will not be charged for using the spot instance. However, if the spot instance is terminated at any point after the first 60 minutes, you will be charged for the entire number of seconds the instance was running.

Amazon EBS

Amazon EBS volumes are storage volumes that can be attached to compute instances to provide additional space for file storage while files are being used in computation tasks. EBS volumes can be attached to the following types of instances:

• Instances that do not include any storage space (EBS-only instances), such as c4 and m4 instances. EBS storage is mandatory for these instances and you can define any size from 2 GB to 4096 GB depending on your task's storage requirements during computation.
• Instances that already include storage space, in order to increase the available storage on the computation instance. In this case, the instance storage is completely replaced by the attached EBS storage, up to the maximum of 4096 GB. The option to increase storage size for instances with their own storage is especially convenient for bioinformatics workflows as the files that are used as inputs for computation tasks and the files produced as results can be very large.

EBS is billed on a per second basis, while AWS expresses charges for EBS disk space in GB*hour/month. Please note that Seven Bridges passes through EBS storage costs.

Cost example

Learn more about how EBS is charged from the example below. Note that the example only serves as an illustration of how EBS costs are calculated. For current EBS prices, refer to the official Amazon EBS pricing chart. Make sure to select US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), or Europe (Frankfurt) from the Region dropdown menu.

Running RNA-seq Alignment - TopHat on a c4.2xlarge instance with 1TB of EBS:

• c4.2xlarge = 8 CPUs, 15GB RAM (EBS Only) at $0.44 per Hour
• Additional 1TB of EBS disk space at ~$0.10 per GB*hour/month

Assuming that the workflow took 14 hours and 25 minutes (51900 seconds) to complete:

• c4.2xlarge x 14h25m = $6.34
• 1TB EBS x 14h25m = ($0.10 per GB*hour/month * 1024 GB * 51900 seconds) / (3600 seconds/hour * 24 hours/day * 30 days/month) = $2.05