[Beowulf] $1, 279-per-hour, 30, 000-core cluster built on Amazon EC2 cloud

[mathog]

> "Robert G. Brown" <rgb at phy.duke.edu> wrote:

> Often, but not always, housing, cooling, powering, and even managing 
> the
> hardware is "free" to the researcher, absorbed into the ongoing costs 
> of
> the server room and management staff already needed to run the
> department LAN and servers.

Not always indeed.  My little machine room houses a half dozen machines 
from other biology division
people, and they are not charged to keep them there.  However, putting 
a computer in the central
campus machine rooms is not free.  And new computer rooms, at least 
those of any size, do not
get free power.  After geology put in this monster:

   http://www.gps.caltech.edu/uploads/Image/Facilities/Beowulf.jpg

the administration decided that when a computer room pretty much needs 
its own
substation, it is well beyond the incidental overhead costs they are 
willing to
pick up for average research labs.

Along similar lines, I would guess that SLAC has to pay for its own 
power, rather than
Stanford covering it out of overhead.

Regards,

David Mathog
mathog at caltech.edu
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech