Comment Do you count manpower and infrastructure costs? (Score 1) 264
If you are extremely data heavy, the cloud becomes quickly much more expensive than buying your own. The Broad Institute made some recent experiments on Amazon analyzing genome experiments, and they said Amazon was 4x more expensive.
But for her cpu-heavy workloads the cloud would work perfectly.
more things to consider:
If she buys her own hardware there are a lot of extra costs to the raw hardware:
1 someone needs to set the thing up, administer it, and support it with patches, etc. even for a small cluster this is a good percentage of a person. if she has a slave student doing that, great! although if the guy leaves there will be an issue. if she needs to spend money on a person, then amazon will be muchmuch cheaper.
2 there is an electricity bill and you need space, probably cooled space. if it is available, great! otherwise it can be a showstopper (fire hazard in a lab)
These costs are included when people talk about total cost of ownership. If you factor them in, the cloud suddenly becomes veeery interesting. Btw, EC2 is not the only player on the market now, there is Azure and also the IBM SmartCloud, with competitive pricing.
For normal cluster computing you can go to a number of startups that will build an on-demand cluster for you based on amazon, my favorite in the research domain is cloudbroker - http://www.cloudbroker.com/ - who will actually render the software you need into a SaaS based on EC2 or the IBM cloud. you just launch your hpc cloud app, with your uploaded data and you pay for the workload you did. the bill includes just amazon or ibm costs, licenses if any and a surcharge by cloudbroker which is totally worth the money because now you do not even need to set up the software and the virtual machines anymore.
But for her cpu-heavy workloads the cloud would work perfectly.
more things to consider:
If she buys her own hardware there are a lot of extra costs to the raw hardware:
1 someone needs to set the thing up, administer it, and support it with patches, etc. even for a small cluster this is a good percentage of a person. if she has a slave student doing that, great! although if the guy leaves there will be an issue. if she needs to spend money on a person, then amazon will be muchmuch cheaper.
2 there is an electricity bill and you need space, probably cooled space. if it is available, great! otherwise it can be a showstopper (fire hazard in a lab)
These costs are included when people talk about total cost of ownership. If you factor them in, the cloud suddenly becomes veeery interesting. Btw, EC2 is not the only player on the market now, there is Azure and also the IBM SmartCloud, with competitive pricing.
For normal cluster computing you can go to a number of startups that will build an on-demand cluster for you based on amazon, my favorite in the research domain is cloudbroker - http://www.cloudbroker.com/ - who will actually render the software you need into a SaaS based on EC2 or the IBM cloud. you just launch your hpc cloud app, with your uploaded data and you pay for the workload you did. the bill includes just amazon or ibm costs, licenses if any and a surcharge by cloudbroker which is totally worth the money because now you do not even need to set up the software and the virtual machines anymore.
