Amazing chart on immigration/emigration of researchers

I don't think that much needs to be said about the picture, but here you go anyway..

- Other than Belgium and Denmark (where the US is barely #2), the US is the #1 choice for emigration
- I'd assume China's emigration fraction will be similar to India's, but the striking thing about Indian emigres is that they (we) pretty much flock only to the US, whereas a decent number of Chinese also move to Canada
- Man.. look at those Germans move around !

Linky http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-brain-trade#.UE_uhs1ViPU.facebook

Cluster computing on the cloud (by the numbers)

I was recently involved in some consulting work with a small aircraft company and had to look up computing costs on privately owned clouds. I've always pooh-poohed this in the past because it seemed too expensive and cumbersome. The numbers have, however, gotten to a point where a second look is required. The following numbers are for the Amazon cloud and the rest of the vendors are competitive with this:

Usage of 16 cores costs $2.4 / hour and the first GB of data transfer is free.

If you're a bit more serious and are thinking long term, a yearly lease of 16 cores costs $4148 (up front) + $ 0.54 / hr and $0.12/GB. These costs can go down if you're thinking even more big time.

So let's crunch some numbers here... Assuming we need 16 cores at 60% utility over an entire year, the cost comes to $7k + data transfer. For a 3 year lease, it is $15k + data transfer.

96 such cores over 3 years thus cost $90k + data transfer. Unless you're running calcs that you shouldn't be running, data transfer won't be more than $10k, so we're looking at $100k over 3 years.

Compare this with your own 96 core cluster that probably is really useful for only 3 years - It costs $25k not including cooling, power, space and system administration. The last two items are definitely non-trivial. At a place like Stanford (or anywhere else, for that matter) you have to move heaven and earth to carve out space and a system admin costs $200k/year (including benefits - So even assuming that maintaining your cluster constitutes less than 5% of his/her responsibility, we're looking at non-trivial numbers). All said and done, it won't be unfair to put the real cost at $50k over 3 years.

Factor of 2 ? wow! Even if you just consider the cost of your cluster, it is just a factor of 4.

Clouds are here to stay... even from a HPC perspective

A Sense of Scale

Apple's recent announcement of it's cash pile and the California government's much maligned money problems got me thinking about the following numbers:

California:

Population: 39 Million
GDP : $ 2 Trillion
Budget deficit: $10 Billion
Total debt: $ 360 Billion

Apple Inc:

Employees: 60 K
Revenue: $ 110 Billion
Profit : $ 26 Billion
Cash Reserves: $ 100 Billion

Stanford University:

Staff+Students: 20 K
Revenue: $3.8 Billion
Net Inflow: $4.0 Billion
Total Endowment: $ 18 Billion

 

To be continued....

Energy use and GDP

Per capita electricity use / day
USA : 40 units (of which 36% is residential)
EU : 20 units (35% is residential)
China : 7 units (15% is residential
India : 2.5 units (!) (20% is residential)
World : 8 units (27% is residential)

Take a look at this very interesting graph..  
A good straight-line fit gives us a GDP of 40 cents for every unit of energy (total, not just electricity) consumed.  I know there are some implicit, non causal relationships, but this is a wonderful number to remember.. say for India to reach a per capita GDP of $10000, the annual per capita energy use could be close to 25000 units. Another way of looking at it (a Nobel winning Stanford Prof says this): For (roughly) every dollar spent on energy, you typically generate 4 dollars of GDP.  Quite remarkably, this number is more or less the same across all type of economies including for the big bad US of A. Americans account for 25% of the world's energy consumption and account for 29% of its GDP. In other words, there are no shortcuts, at least so far.


India better be building one nuclear reactor every month for the next 20 years ?

Daily energy use of the world : 360 billion units
Global power consumption : 15 Tera watts
Guy with a plan:  http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/susenergy2030.html

Some numbers related to Energy

Energy Densities (Amount of energy released when the given substance completely combusts with oxygen at standard atmospheric conditions)

Coal :          10-24 MJ/kg
Wood :        14 MJ/kg

Gasoline*:    44.2 MJ/kg (31.7 MJ/litre)
Natural gas: 53.9 MJ/kg (0.038 MJ/litre)
LNG          : 53.9 MJ/kg (22 MJ/litre)
Propane     : 50 MJ/kg (25 MJ/litre)
Biogas       : 28 MJ/kg  (7 MJ/litre)
Hydrogen : 119 MJ/kg (8.1 MJ/litre)

Lead-acid batteries : 0.125 MJ/kg
Li-Ion batteries : 0.432 MJ/kg
Alkaline batteries : 0.594 MJ/kg

* Diesel and Kerosene are within 3% of this number

Let's switch to convenient energy units i.e.,  1 unit = 1 kilo watt - hour = 3.6 MJ

So a kg of coal contains roughly 6 units of energy and a litre of Gasoline contains about 8.75 units of energy.

Note that the energy density of the best possible battery is about 100 times less than that of an equivalent mass of gasoline. Of course, electrical energy conversion is much more efficient than thermal energy conversion, but this fact is only going to buy us a factor of 2. In addition to being heavy,  battery electrodes are quite expensive as well. Even though things are improving, you should get a sense of what electric cars are up against.

If you assume that gasoline costs $3.50 / gallon, the price you are paying per unit of energy content comes to 11 cents. This is quite interesting because we pay around 10 cents / unit of residential electricity.

Cost / unit of energy content  (at wholesale prices) :

Coal  :  0.4 cents / unit
Natural gas : 1.5 cents / unit
Crude oil : 5 cents / unit

Note that so far, we've been just talking about energy content in fuels and haven't considered conversion losses. If we take everything into account and go by the wikipedia definition:

Levelized Energy Cost (LEC) is an economic assessment of the cost of the energy-generating system including all the costs over its lifetime: initial investment, operations and maintenance, cost of fuel and cost of capital,  this is what we get

 The chart shows cost / Mega watt - hr, so divide the last column (which is in dollars) by 1000 to get cost / unit of electricity. So according to this chart, conventional sources cost less than 10 cents / unit and land-based wind energy is competitive. Solar energy continues to be off the charts expensive even with all the recent advances.

Coal and natural gas based energy is dirt cheap and the big 3 energy consumers (USA, China and India) have enough reserves to last out this century at least as far as electricity use is concerned. Transportation fuel may be a bit more complicated with the approach of peak oil (and such), but I think gas to liquid technologies will come to the fore. Note that if more stringent emission restrictions are brought in on fossil fuels, wind energy has a good chance to be very viable and Solar can become borderline competitive.

Overall,  the cost of energy continues to be amazingly low considering the fact that the best cyclist in the planet can only give you 0.3 units of energy over an hour and animal labor isn't that much different. Yes! I compared the present situation with the stone age to make you feel better!