Purchase Allocation

Purchases made by UF faculty members, and faculty at any university in the State of Florida, and collaborators are heavily subsidized, and therefore are very competitive when compared with purchases from computer manufacturers and from the commercial cloud providers.

NOTE The support model for faculty and their students at other universities in the State of Florida is a distributed model. Faculty and their associates must contact their local IT and research computing support staff with their questions and problems. You can find the contacts for each university here.

Startup companies supported by UF Innovate can use discounted rates.

Commercial pricing is also available for qualifying organizations.

Below is a list of the various allocations that can be purchased with Research Computing. 

Purchase Type Purchase Duration Data Type Resource Type
HiPerGator Hardware Purchase Five Years Not Restricted NCU, NGU, BSU, OSU
HiPerGator Service Purchase Less than Five Years Not Restricted NCU, NGU, BSU, OSU, PUBAPPS
HiPerGator-RV Hardware Purchase Five Years Restricted RNCU, RNGU, RRSU
HiPerGator-RV Service Purchase Less than Five Years Restricted RNCU, RNGU, RRSU
Consultation Purchase N/A N/A Consulting Hours
Free Trial Allocation Three Months Non-Restricted Any Resource Types except consulting hours or HiPerGator-RV allocations

UFIT’s Research Computing resource access is available either by purchase of hardware or through a charged service. See the Groups and Allocations policy page for more details. Note that when purchased as a service, the cost of resources is 10% higher than equipment purchased for its lifetime. Training and consultation services are also available to cluster users.

Restricted data (HIPAA, FERPA, ITAR/EAR) can be used on HiPerGator as described in Policies and Procedures.

There are two different tracks to purchase HiPerGator allocations, depending on whether you are part of UF or an external organization, such as another university in Florida or a UF-supported startup company. 

Internal Purchase by UF Faculty or colleges and and departments

Select the price sheet appropriate for your type of purchase and decide what level of investment will meet your research needs. These pages show the available items for purchase and have links at the bottom to the purchase form. You will fill out the form with the items you wish to purchase and will be asked questions about the type of funds and the charfield string for the account to be used. After you submit the form, someone for the UFIT Business Center will contact you to put a PO in place.

Purchases by External Organizations

The process has the following steps:

  • Working with UFIT Research Computing staff for advice, obtain a quote
  • If you are not a registered organization, it may be necessary to fill out this form (coming soon)
  • Issue a purchase order to UF using these details
    • Address
    • Etc
  • Once UF receives the PO, the HiPerGator resources will be allocated
  • An invoice will be sent for payment

Then check the prices from the appropriate page below and use the link at the bottom to generate a quote to start the process

Resource Definitions

Resource Type Definition
NCU Normalized Compute Unit
NGU Normalized GPU Unit
AGU Advanced GPU Unit
BSU Blue Storage Unit
OSU Orange Storage Unit
PUBAPPS PubApps Allocation
RNCU Restricted Data Normalized Compute Unit
RNGU Restricted Data Normalized GPU Unit
RRSU Restricted Data Replicated Storage Unit