Cloud and on-premises data center usage, expenditures, and approaches to return on investment: A survey of academic research computing organizations

Alan Chalker, Curtis W. Hillegas, Alan Sill, Sharon Broude Geva, and Craig A. Stewart. 2020. In Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 26–33. https://doi.org/10.1145/3311790.3396642

Critically important findings from this first survey include the following: many of the respondents are engaged in some form of analysis of return in research computing investments, but only a minority currently report the results of such analyses to their upper-level administration. Most respondents are experimenting with use of commercial cloud resources but no respondent indicated that they have found use of commercial cloud services to create financial benefits compared to their current methods. There is clear correlation between levels of investment in research cyberinfrastructure and the scale of both cpu core-hours delivered and the financial level of supported research grants. Also interesting is that almost every respondent indicated that they participate in some sort of national cooperative or nationally provided research computing infrastructure project and most were involved in academic computing-related organizations, indicating a high degree of engagement by institutions of higher education in building and maintaining national research computing ecosystems. Institutions continue to evaluate cloud-based HPC service models, despite having generally concluded that so far cloud HPC is too expensive to use compared to their current methods.