Project costing#
This task is the responsibility of Project Team.
Support costs#
The common infrastructure and technical support across all Turing TREs represents a fixed cost across all projects. We aim to recover a proportion of these costs from each project:
for short-running projects: £550 as a one-off charge when the project is set up
for long-running projects: £550 for each month of operation
Azure costs#
The basic infrastructure of our TRE contains the following:
remote desktop gateway
networking and routing components
1 TB of secure file storage
GitLab server for version control
CodiMD server for collaborative document writing
The cost of this infrastructure is around £540 per month.
You will also need some virtual machines to analyse the secure data.
There is a list of available virtual machine sizes and costs here.
Our default setup is to use one Standard_D2s_v3 virtual machine (2 CPUs and 8 GB RAM)
one Standard_D2s_v3 virtual machine
this costs around £60 per month
On top of this the following optional components can be added:
database server (PostgreSQL and/or Microsoft SQL)
each database server costs around £80 per month
You can also make the following changes
increase the amount of data storage
this costs around £35 per TB per month
increase the number of CPUs and amount of available RAM on the analysis VM
costs are dependent on the chosen virtual machine size
use an analysis VM with an integrated GPU
costs are dependent on the chosen virtual machine size
Example project costings#
Some example projects with associated costings are included below. You may want to use one of these as a template for your own project costing. Please get in touch with us at trustedresearch@turing.ac.uk if you have any questions.
Small project#
For a project with no special requirements and a small project team, the following should be sufficient.
Item |
Cost (£ / month) |
|---|---|
SRE infrastructure |
540 |
Standard_D2s_v3 VM |
60 |
Total |
600 |
Project needing a database#
For a project requiring a PostgreSQL or SQL database, the following should be factored in.
Item |
Cost (£ / month) |
|---|---|
SRE infrastructure |
540 |
Standard_D2s_v3 VM |
60 |
PostgreSQL or SQL database |
80 |
Total |
680 |
Project needing more processing power#
For a project that needs to do a lot of parallel or batch processing, the standard virtual machine will be too small.
See here to read more about compute-optimised virtual machine sizes.
Using, for example, a Standard_F16s (16 CPUs and 32 GB RAM) will give the following costs:
Item |
Cost (£ / month) |
|---|---|
SRE infrastructure |
540 |
Standard_F16s VM |
500 |
Total |
1040 |
Project needing more memory#
For a project that needs to do in-memory caching or manage large datasets in memory, the standard virtual machine will be too small.
See here to read more about memory-optimised virtual machine sizes.
Using, for example, a Standard_E8_v5 (8 CPUs and 64 GB RAM) will give the following costs:
Item |
Cost (£ / month) |
|---|---|
SRE infrastructure |
540 |
Standard_F16s VM |
320 |
Total |
860 |
Project needing a GPU#
For a project that wants to do computer vision or deep learning, a GPU might be needed.
See here to read more about GPU-optimised virtual machine sizes.
Using, for example, a Standard_NC6 (6 CPUs, 1 GPU and 56 GB RAM) will give the following costs:
Item |
Cost (£ / month) |
|---|---|
SRE infrastructure |
540 |
Standard_NC6 VM |
570 |
Total |
1110 |
Project with many participants#
For a project with many participants it may be convenient to deploy several different virtual machines. For example, a project with ten people that wants to share each virtual machine between two people would have the following costs:
Item |
Cost (£ / month) |
|---|---|
SRE infrastructure |
540 |
Standard_D2s_v3 VM |
60 |
Standard_D2s_v3 VM |
60 |
Standard_D2s_v3 VM |
60 |
Standard_D2s_v3 VM |
60 |
Standard_D2s_v3 VM |
60 |
Total |
840 |
Project needing lots of data storage#
For a project that deals with large datasets, the standard 1 TB of data storage might be insufficient. Using, for example, 10 TB of storage instead will have the following costs (using a typical cost of £35 per month for each TB of storage).
Item |
Cost (£ / month) |
|---|---|
SRE infrastructure |
540 |
Additional 9 TB of storage |
315 |
Total |
855 |