How to cost account HPC compute hours?

4 pointsniels_olson1 comment

I was recently granted some hours at a high performance computing facility. I have asked for a cost accounting, but since I'm a federal employee, there is no cost. I'm trying to figure out how to calculate the value of this resource. I'm not sure EC2 prices are a comparable commodity. Any recommendations?

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HPC costs vary significantly with the hardware and size of datacenter, if you want to break it down. It's probably best to ask them what the cost would be if you weren't a federal employee. Otherwise, ask them for a total cost of ownership for a server or total cost of operation per year per server, and you can divide that out by compute-hours (cost per core-hour).

Worst case just take the EC2/Google Cloud/Azure numbers, since that's your market comparable providers. Any papers or ROI calculations you can fudge with "approximately" or "at least". I'd guess that your HPC provider isn't as cost optimized as EC2.

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