Archive for May, 2019

May 24th, 2019

HPC! To cloud or not to cloud….

Over the course of my career I have been involved with the provision of High Performance Computing (HPC) at almost every level. As a researcher and research software engineer I have been, and continue to be, a user of many large scale systems.  As a member of research computing support, I was involved in service development and delivery, user-support, system administration and HPC training. Finally, as a member of senior leadership teams, I have been involved in the financial planning and strategic development of institution-wide HPC  services.

In recent years, the question that pops up at every level of involvement with HPC is ‘Should we do this with our own equipment or should we do this in the cloud?’  

This is an extremely complex, multi-dimensional question where the parameters are constantly shifting.  The short, answer is always ‘well…it depends’ and it always does ‘depend’…on many things!  What do you want to do? What is the state of the software that you have available? How much money do you have? How much time do you have? What support do you have? What equipment do you currently have and who else are you working with and so on.

Today, I want to focus on just one of these factors. Cost.  I’m not saying that cost is necessarily the most important consideration in making HPC-related decisions but given that most of us have fixed budgets, it is impossible to ignore.

The value of independence

I have been involved in many discussions of HPC costs over the years and have seen several attempts at making the cloud vs on-premise cost-comparison.  Such attempts are often biased in one direction or the other.  It’s difficult not to be when you have a vested interest in the outcome.

When I chose to leave academia and join industry, I decided to work with the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG), a research computing company that has been in business for almost 50 years. One reason for choosing them was their values which strongly resonate with my own.  Another was their independence.  NAG are a not-for-profit (yet commercial!) company who literally cannot be bought.  They solve the independence problem by collaborating with pretty much everybody in the industry.

So, NAG are more interested in helping clients solve their technical computing problems than they are in driving them to any given solution.  Cloud or on-premise?  They don’t mind…they just want to help you make the decision.

Explore HPC cost models yourself

NAG’s VP for HPC services and consulting, Andrew Jones (@hpcnotes), has been teaching seminars on Total Cost Of Ownership models for several years at events like the SC Supercomputing conference series.  To support these tutorials, Andrew created a simple, generic TCO model spreadsheet to illustrate the concepts and to show how even a simple TCO model can guide decisions. 

Many people asked if NAG could send them the TCO spreadsheet from the tutorial but they decided to go one better and converted it into a web-form where you can start exploring some of the concepts yourself. 

I also made a video about it.

If you want more, get in touch with either me (@walkingrandomly) or Andrew (@hpcnotes) on twitter or email hpc@nag.com.  We’ll also be teaching this type of thing at ISC 2019 so please do join us there too.

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