Then SWITCHengines can offer you the following benefits:
- Giving access to VMs to a large number of students for interactive use at well defined times and costs
- Simple administration and automated setup of a large number of students and/or VMs
- Adaptive usage and charging model with no up-front investment
- Cost limiting options for all resources used by students.
In addition you get the following advantages:
- All data protected under Swiss law and located only in Switzerland within the academic community network
- Full control by the institutions, including a flexible usage and charging model corresponding to the budgeting needs
- Strong influence on governance via the SWITCH Foundation council
- Direct backbone connection to the SWITCH network and data transfer as well as ingress/egress at no cost
- Multi-year charging models with discounts
Please note that you are entitled to a special discount for education use in the above form.
Choose your model
There are two billing models to choose from:
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Either resources are billed “as you go”
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or we provide multi year volume discounts for longer-term usage, such as for scientific projects or IT-services
For participating institutions, we combine the two models to provide discounts also if an institution uses a certain amount of resources cumulatively.
Pricing information for Swiss Academia
SWITCHengines Pricing Flyer 2021 (Current as of 1.1.2021)
Currently we are invoicing the following items: CPU, RAM, IPv4 Addresses and Storage, Microsoft software licenses.
Next Event
IT for Research Day September 2019, Fribourg
Please find the details on the details page.
Past Events
IT for Research Day September 2018, Berne
Please find the details on the details page.
Research IT day June 2017, Lausanne
Please find the details on the details page.
Event for Big Data & Faster Research April 2017
Please find the details on the details page.
Event for IT services and Researchers October 2016
Please find the details on the details page.
Events for IT services in May 2015
For more information see this page.
Events for Researchers and Lecturers in June 2015
For more information see this page.
Basic infrastructure for funded projects
Projects funded by swissuniversities' program "P-5 Scientific information" can use the compute and storage services created by this project free of charge. Projects can be accommodated within the limits of available capacity until August 2018 (subject to agreement with SWITCH).
Data lifecycle management (DLCM)
Currently the University of Geneva, which is responsible for the national long-term preservation infrastructure, is working on the architecture and its proof of concept (POC) of an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) compliant system. For that, there is a need to benefit from cloud services such as proposed by SWITCHengines. The POC of that system is realized on SWITCHengines.
For more information about the DLCM project, see: http://www.dlcm.ch
e-Science Coordination Team Project, University of Zurich (formerly eSCT, now EnhanceR)
University of Zurich, a partner in the e-Science Coordination Team (formerly eSCT, now EnhanceR) project has been using SWITCHengines for several data analysis tasks in a Cloud bursting setup:
- Biochemistry: Docking Ligands to Proteins with rDock
- Business: Process social network data through Natural Language Processing tools
- Geography: Process GPS data in an RData file
The SWITCHengines service helped the Science IT team of the University of Zurich to satisfy peak requests for computing resources.
For more information about the EnhanceR project, see https://www.enhancer.ch/
National e-Infrastructure link for Switzerland (NeI-CH)
The NeI-CH project has started to run physics related computations on the cloud infrastructure. The simulations are tested for their fitness to the cloud infrastructure also with regard to particularities and new possibilities compared to the traditional HPC environments.
For more information about the DLCM project, see: http://lhep.unibe.ch/neich/
-> Subproject TmLQCD (Twisted Mass Lattice QCD)
TmLQCD is a Hybrid Monte Carlo implementation for Wilson and Wilson twisted mass fermions and inverter for different versions of the Dirac operators, is fully parallelised and tested successfully on various modern architectures.The goal of this exercise is to make some exploratory studies on the features of particles on low-energy regions.
-> Subproject GEANT
Geant4 (Geometry and Tracking) is a platform for simulation of passage of particles through matter. It is a standard tool for design and simulation of particle physics detectors, also used in medical and space physics applications. The outcome of this exercise will be a master thesis on muon background simulation for a neutrino experiment. The general Geant4 image created, can in the future be used in other applications.
-> Subproject ATLAS Simulation
The ATLAS Simulation is also based on Geant4. The detector geometry is described and the interactions of the particles with the different layers of the detector is simulated. This is included in the general ATLAS software framework (Athena). The outcome of the exercise is to produce real simulated events as part of the general ATLAS Monte Carlo simulation campaign. This requires the transparent integration of the ATLAS framework with the cloud infrastructure.
SWISSUbase
SWISSUbase is a national cross-disciplinary solution for Swiss universities and other research organisations in need of local institutional data repositories for their researchers. The platform relies on international archiving standards and processes to ensure that data are preserved and accessible in the long-term. SWISSUbase is a collaboration by FORS, University of Lausanne, University of Zurich and SWITCH.
