Christian Terboven, Deputy Lead of HPC at the University of Aachen interviews Microsoft’s Dan Reed in a new blog post:
Christian Terboven: Being the person I am, I started the talk with a nasty question on the pricing scheme of Azure (and similar commercial offerings), claiming that it is pretty expensive both per CPU hour as well as per byte of I/O. Just recently we did a full cost accounting to calculate our price per CPU hour for our HPC service, and we found us to be cheaper by a notable factor.
Dan Reed: Academic sites, of reasonable size such as yours, can do HPC cheaper because they are utilizing the hardware on a 24×7 basis. Traditionally, they do not offer service-level agreements on how fast any job starts, they just queue the jobs. Azure is different, and it has to be, one can get the resources available in a guaranteed time frame. As of today, HPC in the Cloud is interesting for burst scenarios where the on-promise resources are not sufficient, or for people for whom traditional HPC is too complex (regardless of Windows vs. Linux, just maintaining an on-premise cluster versus buying HPC time when it is needed).
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