CYBER-INSIGHT: Evaluating Cyberinfrastructure Total Cost of Ownership

学术研究计算技术日新月异。此外，从科学和社会中可用的海量数据中收集见解的新方法正在刺激对计算基础设施的需求，并促使商业公司提供类似于学术环境中的基础设施。这些因素以及其他因素正在给学术机构带来压力，要求它们找到具有成本效益的方法来提供计算基础设施，以最大限度地提高科学效益，同时将成本降至最低。该项目旨在了解向学术研究社区提供高性能计算能力的不同方法的成本效益。具体地说，该项目建议构建、发布和定期更新本地HPC群集和数据存储系统相对于NSF支持的设施和商业云服务(如Amazon AWS、Microsoft Azure和Google Cloud Platform)不断变化的总拥有成本(TCO)的比较。该项目的成果将对国家研究界、机构资源提供者和资助机构具有广泛的适用性。此外，该项目正在与许多组织合作，以促进项目成果的长期维护和数据共享，目标是创建用于长期分析的可持续基础设施。具体而言，该团队建议构建和托管Jupyter笔记本，使网络基础设施(CI)社区能够基于各种使用模式和性能预期添加、修改和探索总拥有成本(TOC)模型。这将允许该项目探索一些问题，例如，与大学集群相比，何时使用商业云来满足研究人员的需求是否具有成本效益？员工成本、硬件利用率、资本折旧、更换成本、货币价值、投资回报、电力和冷却成本以及带宽费用对TCO有何影响？由于科学门户将资源隐藏在Web界面之后，这样的查询应该在何时何地执行？除了调查这些重要问题外，该项目还有望促进社区建设、共享实验和比较。该项目的最终目标是开发比较模型，使供资机构、机构资源提供者和个人用户能够评估具体选择和补贴的成本和收益。最后，该项目将与学术科学计算联盟(CASC)、美国大学协会(AAU)和公共和土地赠与大学协会(APLU)高级研究官员(SRO)和CIO合作，促进项目成果的长期维护和数据共享。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Academic research computing technologies is rapidly changing. In addition, new methods in gleaning insight from the deluge of data that is becoming available in science and society are fueling demand for computing infrastructure, and motivating commercial companies to provision infrastructure similar to those found at academic environments. These factors, as well as others, are putting pressure on academic institutions to find cost-effective approaches to providing computing infrastructure to maximize scientific benefit while minimizing cost. This project seeks to understand the cost-effectiveness of different methods of delivering High Performance Computing capabilities to the academic research community. Specifically, the project proposes to build, publish, and regularly update comparisons of the evolving total cost of ownership (TCO) of on premise HPC clusters and data storage systems relative to NSF-supported facilities and commercial cloud services such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. The results of the project will have broad applicability to the national research community, institutional resource providers, and funding agencies. In addition, the project is collaborating with many organizations to promote long-term maintenance and data sharing of the project outcomes, with the goal of creating a sustainable infrastructure for long-term analysis.Concretely, the team proposes to build and host a Jupyter notebook that will enable the cyberinfrastructure (CI) community to add, modify, and explore total cost of ownership (TOC) models based on a variety of usage patterns and performance expectations. This will allow the project to explore questions such as when is it cost-effective to use commercial clouds compared to university clusters to service researcher needs? How do staff costs, hardware utilization, capital depreciation, replacement costs, the value of money, return on investment, power and cooling costs, and bandwidth charges affect TCO? As science gateways hide resources behind web interfaces, when and where should such queries execute? In addition to investigating these important questions, the project is also expected to facilitate community building, shared experimentation and comparisons. The ultimate goal of the project is to develop comparative models that allow funding agencies, institutional resource providers, and individual users to evaluate the costs and benefits of specific choices and subsidies. Finally, the project will collaborate with the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC), the Association of American Universities (AAU) and the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities (APLU) senior research officers (SROs) and CIOs to promote long-term maintenance and data sharing of the project outcomes.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.