NCI off-net and on-net data transfers

General
, ,
1

I was re-reading NCI’s user policy before recertifying my account, and this bit confused me:

Off-Net Transfers
Where possible, users are expected to access the NCI facilities via AARNet (referred to as “on-net” access), or through an internet service provider (ISP) that peers with AARNet.
While data transfers to or from facilities which are “on-net” do not incur additional charges, transfers into NCI from facilities which are “off-net” incur a charge of approximately $5.50 per gigabyte.
Accordingly, NCI:

  • Will cover the AARNet charges which it incurs, although projects must pay for any communications charges billed directly to them by AARNet, or any other communications organisations;
  • Reserves the right to charge users the cost of excessive off-net data traffic as a condition of access to the facilities.

NB: You can query the off- versus on-net status of an IP address on this AARNet webpage.

Can anyone explain what this means, practically? (especially in terms of climate datasets, sshing from a laptop, or transfers from other supercomputers?) 1 GB is pretty small

2

This is something for the NCI helpdesk if you want to be sure about the answer.

Wikipedia implies that most universities will be on AARNet already.

Folks obviously move lots of data around, and i’ve never known anyone get charged (e.g. even for downloading terrabytes of imagery from overseas etc)

1 Like