How Much Does it Cost to Run an HPC Server in the Cloud?

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HPC-Cloud-300x214In this video, David Bolton from Slashdot Media looks at the costs of running high-powered servers in the Cloud from three providers: AWS, Google and Microsoft. The Cloud computing services are compared by price, capability and available features.

According to Wolfgang Gentzsch over at The UberCloud (February 2014) a reasonable price for one core hour on a similar powerful HPC system in the cloud is about $0.20 (not including additional services and application software of course). The workload per year for a 20% utilized cluster is equivalent to 256 cores * 24 hours * 365 days * 20 % = 448,512 core hours, or $89,702 when moved to the cloud. Obviously, when compared to $333K above, the cloud option is economically very attractive (in this case 3.7 times better than the in-house option). Read the Full Story.

Update: The cost estimates in the above mentioned article are from February 2014. Wolfgang just added an update for the cloud resource and software cost as of December 2015: cloud service $0.10 or less per core per hour, and engineering application $0.20 – $0.50 per core per hour for software with annual license fee between $20K and $60K.

Click here to download the insideHPC Guide to Cloud Computing for HPC

Comments

  1. The cost estimates in the above mentioned article are from February 2014. I just added an update for the cloud resource and software cost as of December 2015: cloud service $0.10 or less per core per hour, and engineering application $0.20 – $0.50 per core per hour for software with annual license fee between $20K and $60K.