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In my experience with research computing, if you are able to keep a computer doing active work more than 60% of the time, it will be cheaper to purchase and run

In my experience with research computing, if you are able to keep a computer doing active work more than 60% of the time, it will be cheaper to purchase and run that computer yourself than renting it from AWS. That's the case even with commodity machines with only 10G Ethernet interconnect. $15k for a machine is only $0.34/hour over 5 years. That doesn't buy much of an AWS machine. (Yes, cooling, real estate and power are all overhead on that, but researchers often don't pay those costs directly, they are covered by the university with other monies.)

dekhn 6y ago
You're completely ignoring the other valuable aspects of being in a cloud: you're close to huge amounts of high throughput storage (blob and DB), and can increase/decrease the size of your fleet trivially. These are critical to nearly all modern scientific workflows (moreso than the raw compute, IMHO). As for the cost structure for research computing, the argument that the costs are externalized isn't a good one- that overhead that pays for the facility, and the networking, comes out of your grant money, and using grad student time to admin your cluster often just causes your grad students to leave for FAAMG.
- secabeen 6y ago
  > You're completely ignoring the other valuable aspects of being in a cloud: you're close to huge amounts of high throughput storage (blob and DB), and can increase/decrease the size of your fleet trivially. These are critical to nearly all modern scientific workflows (moreso than the raw compute, IMHO). That has not been my experience. There are lots of scientific workflows that only need 10s of TB at most, yet can still consume lots of cycles. > As for the cost structure for research computing, the argument that the costs are externalized isn't a good one- that overhead that pays for the facility, and the networking, comes out of your grant money, and using grad student time to admin your cluster often just causes your grad students to leave for FAAMG. At the universities I've worked at, equipment (large purchases) is except from overhead, or results in a lower overhead charge. (Researchers balk at paying a ~50% overhead rate on a $1million instrument). Using grad student time to admin your cluster is dumb, but I'm more talking about users who need single-digit numbers of computers. If you need real HPC, you're in the world of queues, national and regional supercomputers, etc. etc.

dekhn 6y ago

You're completely ignoring the other valuable aspects of being in a cloud: you're close to huge amounts of high throughput storage (blob and DB), and can increase/decrease the size of your fleet trivially. These are critical to nearly all modern scientific workflows (moreso than the raw compute, IMHO). As for the cost structure for research computing, the argument that the costs are externalized isn't a good one- that overhead that pays for the facility, and the networking, comes out of your grant money, and using grad student time to admin your cluster often just causes your grad students to leave for FAAMG.

secabeen 6y ago
> You're completely ignoring the other valuable aspects of being in a cloud: you're close to huge amounts of high throughput storage (blob and DB), and can increase/decrease the size of your fleet trivially. These are critical to nearly all modern scientific workflows (moreso than the raw compute, IMHO). That has not been my experience. There are lots of scientific workflows that only need 10s of TB at most, yet can still consume lots of cycles. > As for the cost structure for research computing, the argument that the costs are externalized isn't a good one- that overhead that pays for the facility, and the networking, comes out of your grant money, and using grad student time to admin your cluster often just causes your grad students to leave for FAAMG. At the universities I've worked at, equipment (large purchases) is except from overhead, or results in a lower overhead charge. (Researchers balk at paying a ~50% overhead rate on a $1million instrument). Using grad student time to admin your cluster is dumb, but I'm more talking about users who need single-digit numbers of computers. If you need real HPC, you're in the world of queues, national and regional supercomputers, etc. etc.