On Tue, 7 Jul 2009, steve ulrich wrote: > my comments were a bit tongue in cheek. if you're running this > constantly you're typically much better off building out your own > compute infrastructure. i would be remiss if i didn't point out that > there are a lot of folks doing this themselves and a host of folks in > this market segment. if you don't have the need to run large > simulations on an ongoing basis, then utility compute resources like EC2 > are a great way to go and amazon is by no means the only game in town on > that, they've just made the process of setup and billing dead easy. It sounds pretty interesting. An important consideration for most people is power consumption. It is easy to say that 80 CPUs times $0.03/hour times costs $25,000 for 434 days. I can also buy an 80-core system for $25,000. So after about 15 months the costs seem to be the same, but they aren't. I've had to manage my own system and I've had to pay for the electric bills, which are quite substantial. Depending on your circumstances, it seems quite possible that $0.03/hour for a CPU is less expensive than buying your own computer(s), even in the very long run. My situation is different because my team buys the hardware, but the management of the hardware and the electric bills are paid by someone else. So it is almost certainly going to be better for my team to buy the computers, though it might be worse for the university as a whole. (On the other hand, we might not be able to use EC2 because of confidentiality problems.) Mike