The total costs of operation would be much greater than HW Investment + HW Operation (Power, Space, Cooling). Especially initial setup costs and maintenance costs are a big dent; other humongous cost drivers are high availability, etc.
The cluster, announced publicly this week, was created for an unnamed “Top 5 Pharma” customer, and ran for about seven hours at the end of July at a peak cost of $1,279 per hour, including the fees to Amazon and Cycle Computing
Given that the article states that the entire system only ran for about 7 hours, I assume that it was one of those ideal use cases for cloud computing. So the benefit of having a disposable system adds value that is also missing in the napkin calculation. Sure, if you ran the 30k-core cluster for eternity, you might as well build your own data center. But for this case, the comparative cost analysis seems a bit pointless.
One more small nitpick: the $1279 you extrapolated from in your calculation was the peak cost, not the average cost.
The cluster, announced publicly this week, was created for an unnamed “Top 5 Pharma” customer, and ran for about seven hours at the end of July at a peak cost of $1,279 per hour, including the fees to Amazon and Cycle Computing
Given that the article states that the entire system only ran for about 7 hours, I assume that it was one of those ideal use cases for cloud computing. So the benefit of having a disposable system adds value that is also missing in the napkin calculation. Sure, if you ran the 30k-core cluster for eternity, you might as well build your own data center. But for this case, the comparative cost analysis seems a bit pointless.
One more small nitpick: the $1279 you extrapolated from in your calculation was the peak cost, not the average cost.