See my note above, but we have great peering with Fermilab and I failed to mention this above: us-central1 in Council Bluffs, Iowa is also quite close to Fermil

See my note above, but we have great peering with Fermilab and I failed to mention this above: us-central1 in Council Bluffs, Iowa is also quite close to Fermilab (less than 500 miles) so the latency was pretty good too. [Edit: And I should add that by copying into GCS, they were able to grab compute anywhere in us-central1 without worrying about it. Similarly, on preemption, you don't need to transfer all the data from home, you just grab it from GCS again]. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud and helped with this effort.