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
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
