It’s extremely common for academic research groups to have their own hardware. Often, it doesn’t make sense from an overhead/maintenance point of view. If you’r

It’s extremely common for academic research groups to have their own hardware. Often, it doesn’t make sense from an overhead/maintenance point of view. If you’re a single lab large enough to need dedicated compute, you often don’t have the budget for a good admin. If you’re part of a larger group (like it sounds like you are) it is easier and you can afford some of the extra overhead. But, I’ve found that there are two reasons why there is still a lot of on-premise academic compute: 1) legal, 2) cap-ex. For the first, there are still many agreements for data sharing that require strict security compliance. It is certainly possible for this to work on the cloud, but it is more difficult than setting up a hardened cluster that’s not exposed to the internet. IT is normally better setup to audit and approve these on-premises systems than cloud systems. For the second, it is difficult to estimate and write in all of the cloud costs for a grant budget. Trying to manage op-ex can be more of a hassle than just budgeting X amount for “servers” (as a cap-ex). Often, you just care about getting the job done, but less about how long it takes. So, a set capital expense has lower risk than underestimating your cloud needs and not being able to finish your project. (Also, as a bonus, once the equipment is paid for, you get to keep it to use on the next project, or unfunded research).