Credits and billing¶
Bramble checks the Account can pay when an Attitude is launched, and charges it once Mesh & Solve is complete. This page explains what happens at each point, how usage is counted, and what to do if the Account runs short. For the billing types and pages, see the billing reference.
When the Account is checked and charged¶
Charging is part of every Attitude's lifecycle:
Launch → Create → Pre-Checks → Mesh & Solve → Charge Account → post-checks, post-processing and exports
At launch¶
When you launch an Attitude, Bramble first checks the Account:
- Is it active? An Account that hasn't been charged for a simulation in about 6 months can't launch anything, whatever its balance. See account activity.
- Can it pay? This depends on the billing type.
Cash Payments and Core Hours Accounts need enough balance (money or core hours) to cover an estimate of the simulation. The estimate is what the first Attitude of the Run's Baseline used. If the Run has no Baseline, or the Baseline has no recorded usage, the estimate is zero, so the balance only needs to be not negative. Nothing is set aside: the balance stays the same until the Attitude is charged.
Pay per Run Accounts reserve credits for the Attitude straight away. They show as Assigned on the Credits page. If you reset or delete the Attitude before it's charged, the credits are returned. Aborting on its own doesn't return them: they stay reserved until you reset.
If the check fails, the Attitude stops with Insufficient Credits (see below).
At Charge Account¶
Charge Account runs as soon as Mesh & Solve completes. Bramble records the core hours the Attitude used, which then appear on the Core Hours Usage page, and:
- deducts the cost from a Cash Payments balance
- deducts the core hours from a Core Hours allowance
- marks the reserved credits as Used on a Pay per Run Account
Once an Attitude has been charged, resetting it doesn't refund the charge. Each charge also keeps the Account active for another 6 months or so.
How core hours are counted¶
An Attitude's core hours come from the HPC jobs of its Mesh & Solve stage only:
- Each completed job counts its elapsed (wall-clock) hours × the number of cores it ran on.
- Jobs that failed, or were reset, don't count.
- Post-processing and exports, which happen after Charge Account, don't count.
- The total is rounded down to a whole number of core hours.
Where agreed with Bramble, core hours can be scaled to allow for differences between HPC clusters.
The cost of the core hours depends on the HPC queue's rate and the methodology. The Core Hours Usage page shows the rate (Queue Cost) and the resulting Core Hours Cost for each Attitude. For prices, contact support@bramblecfd.com.
When the Account runs short¶
If the Account can't pay at launch, or isn't active, the Attitude's status becomes Insufficient Credits, shown by a red credit-card icon. It counts as an update if you're subscribed to the Project.
Nothing is charged for an Attitude in this state. To recover, first add to the balance. On a Cash Payments Account, an admin can top up. For Pay per Run or Core Hours Accounts, or an inactive Account, contact support@bramblecfd.com. Then reset the Attitude with Insufficient Credits | Reset, and launch it again.
Related: Billing · Add credit · Statuses and lifecycle · Users and accounts