Assessing Cloud ROI for HPC and Enterprise

Grazed from ScientificComputing. Author: Rob Farber.

A complicated decision: To purchase infrastructure or run remotely in the cloud? Bandwidth and data security issues provide the easiest gating factors to evaluate, because an inability to access data kills any chance of using remote infrastructure, be it the public cloud or at a remote HPC center. If running remotely is an option, then the challenge lies in determining the return on investment (ROI) for the remote and local options including:

1. using a hybrid local and remote solution
2. running entirely in a remote cloud
3. pursuing a traditional infrastructure procurement…

Be aware of any technical biases that might affect the analysis. For example, there tends to be significant organizational pride associated with owning a large hardware deployment like a supercomputer or compute cluster, in which case legacy design decisions that justified previous hardware procurements might cause pushback against a decision to move to a remote solution, plus provide future headaches after a decision to run remotely has been made…

Read more from the source @ http://www.scientificcomputing.com/articles/2014/06/assessing-cloud-roi-hpc-and-enterprise