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Idle cluster

A cluster still running after its work finished. It bills at the full rate, and is the largest avoidable cost for most organizations.

Nothing shuts a cluster down for you. That single fact makes this reliably the largest avoidable line item on the platform, and it is why the cost checklist opens with it rather than with right-sizing.

Billing & plansPerformance & optimization

Related terms

  • Cluster: A set of machines, one head node and one or more compute nodes, launched together to run distributed work.
  • Usage: Accumulated compute consumed by an organization in a billing period, shown against plan limits on the dashboard.
  • Pricing plan: The tier assigned to a workspace, which governs its resource limits and concurrency: how much can run, and how much can run at once.
  • HPC as a service (HPCaaS): High-performance computing consumed on demand rather than owned: request compute for one run, stop paying when it ends. No hardware, no scheduler to run.