

How to cost account HPC compute hours? - niels_olson

I was recently granted some hours at a high performance computing facility. I have asked for a cost accounting, but since I&#x27;m a federal employee, there is no cost. I&#x27;m trying to figure out how to calculate the value of this resource. I&#x27;m not sure EC2 prices are a comparable commodity. Any recommendations?
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caw
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.

