What Kind of Cloud Computing Project Costs $32M?

coondoggie writes "The US Department of Energy said today it will spend $32 million on a project that will deploy a large cloud computing test bed with thousands of Intel Nehalem CPU cores and explore commercial offerings from Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Ultimately, the project, known as Magellan, will look at cloud computing as a cost-effective and energy-efficient way for scientists to accelerate discoveries in a variety of disciplines, including analysis of scientific data sets in biology, climate change and physics, the DOE stated. Magellan will explore whether cloud computing can help meet the overwhelming demand for scientific computing. Although computation is an increasingly important tool for scientific discovery, and DOE operates some of the world's most powerful supercomputers, not all research applications require such massive computing power. The number of scientists who would benefit from mid-range computing far exceeds the amount of available resources, the DEO stated."

Comments

In socialist America

[Anonymous Coward]

Hope changes you (and costs 32M)

Re:In socialist America

[sofar]

The DOE stated.

Re:In socialist America

[Itninja]

Or about $0.21 from every tax paying citizen. Once. My God....what a socialist hellscape!

Re:In socialist America

[nxtw]

Or about $0.21 from every tax paying citizen. Once. My God....what a socialist hellscape!

Plus the thousands of other reasonable-sounding government funded projects that cost less than a dollar per taxpayer...

Re:In socialist America

[Ifni]

Can I have $.21 from you? Just once, I promise. And no-one else is going to want the same, I assure you.

This is the same reasoning that allows $x.99 to be such a successful marketing ploy. Have you ever heard the phrase nickel and dimed to death?

Re:In socialist America

[HaZardman27]

I was wondering if I was the only one who noticed the overuse of that statement.

Re:In socialist America

[Itninja]

I will gladly give you $0.21 if I (and the many generations after me) get something useful in return. Like the Internet infrastructure we are all using right now.

Re:In socialist America

[condour75]

and remember, kids: this thread was brought to you by a 40-year-old DARPA project.

Re:In socialist America

[Itninja]

The difference is those projects usually cost less than a dollar year after year, forever. This one would cost less than a dollar once. Then it would be funded privately.

Re:In socialist America

[snspdaarf]

Sounds like the old John Earling ("Earling in the Morning") routine on KRMG. He was making fun of Oral Roberts, but it was, "Send me your dimes. If everyone within the sound of my voice would send me a single dime, I would be a millionaire, and you would be only a dime short."

Re:In socialist America

[martas]

In socialist America, children go to school and learn something useful, everyone has healthcare, the entire planet doesn't see the US as a meddling bully that resorts to violence to solve all of its problems, and technology is seen as an opportunity rather than a nuisance. Oh, the horror!

Re:In socialist America

[tyrione]

The difference is those projects usually cost less than a dollar year after year, forever. This one would cost less than a dollar once. Then it would be funded privately.

I'd imagine it'll take 3 to 5 centuries to match 6 months of just of one's personal vice habits, ala Starbucks, Cigs, Booze, etc.

Re:In socialist America

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know where you are but it was brought to me by Comcast. Last month's bill for $80 confirms it.

Re:In socialist America

[Bigjeff5]

I (and the many generations after me) get something useful in return.

That's the real caveat, isn't it? Things like Social Security were great for a few generations, but before long you'll have to be above the average lifespan to collect because it is going broke. Never mind the fact that that single program alone accounts for about 1/3 of the US deficit. Think about that for a minute - you have to be 65 to collect, and the average life span is in the upper 70's. It's 1/3 of our national debt, yet it will only cover a little more than 1/10th the average citizen's lifetime. It's benefiting the current generation at the expense of the next, and it's exactly the sort of thing people are afraid of with any large government spending project.

The real insidious thing is the hundreds, if not thousands of $32 million projects that fail, and we end up paying for with nothing to show for it. They each individually are too small to take much notice (even $32 has me going "meh" as far as size of project to be worried about), but taken together they represent massive waste.

As far as this particular project, the hardware costs are probably not more than $1 million, it will probably cost $5-10 million to design the system, which is justifiable, and then the other $21 million are all administrative costs. Then the project will over-run when the people running the project change their minds halfway through (and then again change their minds back, or just to something completely different), causing the engineering costs to skyrocket, which in turn causes the administrative costs to skyrocket. I wouldn't be all that surprised if this $32 million project ends up costing $70 million. It happens all the time.

Re:In socialist America

[chucklebutte]

I came a little after reading this.

Re:In socialist America

[deathlyslow]

And the final misspelling DEO.

Re:In socialist America

[Itninja]

I agree that the SSA is a system built for 1930's America. But I guess the principle you state of "It's benefiting the current generation at the expense of the next..." I disagree with. I don't know about you but for the first nearly two decades of my life I was wholly dependent on the then current generation to feed, house, and clothe me. And then for the next decade or so after that, they continued to provide me with employment, and subsidize my car insurance and higher education. I guess I feel I feel it's more like repaying the current generation at the expense of the next.

Re:In socialist America

[martas]

you're welcome.
send the check to 1 Lenin rd., Stalingrad, RU 82317.

Re:In socialist America

[geekoid]

It is NOT going broke. That's a myth thats been perpetrated since it's inception.

I remember when I was a teen, it was supposed to ahve been completly over whelmed by 85, then 2000, now it's 2015.
Read up nio the works of the peple that actually study it. It need MINOR adjustment from time to time but it
s not going to collapse.

Well over 99% of all federal project succeed, on time and within budget, and with less waste.

Failed projects do not equal waste.

"the hardware costs are probably not more than $1 million,"
for a project this size? you clearly have no experience building out systems.

We are tlaking about thousands of systems, and good ones not POS bottom of the line Dell's.

You need to pay for the infrastructure. Back bone, racks buildings and other sunk costs.
(Are you lumping this into administrative?)

Now we need people. They are using linux, so probably 1 fte per 200 machines.
Then system design.

Quite frankly, this is a good price for what they nede to do.

Maybe there will be 'cost over runs'. Over runs are often do to provider cost changes. Contract where something is delivered years after the beginning often have a clause to allow more money to cover those costs. I am talking about hard costs, cabling, concrete, etc . . .

The bidest example is rock. The price of rock can be volatile, so it's not uncommon to see bids where they amount paid in the contract is adjusted to cover the providers cost. If you don't do this, bids would be nearly impossible.

"It happens all the time."
no, but the bias is that it does because the 10,000 times it doesn't happen no one says anything.

I was in the private sector for a great many years, in the few years I've been in the public sector o have been constantly amazed at the tight book keeping, the amount of knowledge people have, the accountability, the incredibly high skill set.
Turns out there are very smart, dedicated and qualified people who take a government job becasue they are tired of not having a life.

Re:In socialist America

[peragrin]

Actually if you understood why SSA is going broke it isn't because of a funding it is because politicaians can't let money sit for time until it's needed.

Basically every up until recently the SSA had been making massive amounts of profits compared to what is paid out. However at the end of the year instead of putting that money safely into a bank account for the next generation to actually use the USA government claimed the money and wrote an IOU to the SSA for said money. our politicians then spent said money on random projects. However we are approaching crunch time for when the money that was supposed to be saved for our future, is going to be needed and the SSA has realized the federal IOU's were written on political toilet paper.

As usual it is careless thinking on politicians that have caused this mess. For whatever reason politicians are the kinds of people who think maxing out your credit cards, and loans is a good way to live.

Re:In socialist America

[drig]

"Never mind the fact that that single program alone accounts for about 1/3 of the US deficit."
Not true. in 2010, SS will add $10B to the deficit. The deficit is projected to be above $1T, resulting in SS being 1%, not 33% as you claim, of the US deficit.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5h6BfoloJOnV0TeI7eIHC1ZWuBxygD9AVLTVO0

"Think about that for a minute - you have to be 65 to collect, and the average life span is in the upper 70's"
Average life span is a tricky measure. Many people die as the very young or as teenagers. A much smaller percentage of people die between 18 and 80. If you've started work, there's a better than even chance of you collecting your social security.

Re:In socialist America

[drig]

This is the best summary of project costs I've read. It applies, as the author said, to private as well as public projects.

Re:In socialist America

[shadowofwind]

No, socialism does not make the military industrial complex weaker.

Re:In socialist America

[RichardJenkins]

You all still think the earth is less than 10,000 years old though, right?

Re:In socialist America

[martas]

i like the way you think:
not resorting to violence => inability to do so => weakness

i suppose this is a logical conclusion from the following way of thinking:
strength => ability to blow to smithereens anyone, anywhere => desire to do so incessantly

Re:In socialist America

[shadowofwind]

i like the way you think:

not resorting to violence => inability to do so => weakness
 

You clearly have no idea how I think.

I am against American militarism. What I just said was that socialism doesn't fix that problem. The Nazi's were of course also socialists. I didn't even argue against socialism, which may be a good idea in other regards, I just said that it doesn't fix the militarism/fascism problem.

Re:In socialist America

[hackstraw]

As far as this particular project, the hardware costs are probably not more than $1 million, it will probably cost $5-10 million to design the system, which is justifiable, and then the other $21 million are all administrative costs. Then the project will over-run when the people running the project change their minds halfway through (and then again change their minds back, or just to something completely different), causing the engineering costs to skyrocket, which in turn causes the administrative costs to skyrocket. I wouldn't be all that surprised if this $32 million project ends up costing $70 million. It happens all the time.

The article was pretty weak in info, but $32mil should get you more than $1mil in equipment. Actually, if this is truly could computing you are buying X number of cpu years and Y number of petabytes worth of diskspace with a guarantee of that X will be delivered and that Y will be of some assurance against failure.

Cloud computing is just a segue to computing as a service. Think of it in terms of power, phone, etc. You pay by the use in some manner or another and billed accordingly.

Re:In socialist America

[martas]

ok, i misunderstood your post. although i wasn't arguing for socialism, i was just pointing out that socialism != having an internationally respected country with a good healthcare system and public education, that's all.

Re:In socialist America

[shadowofwind]

Maybe I read your first post backwards too, sorry.

Re:In socialist America

[chrb]

Think about that for a minute - you have to be 65 to collect, and the average life span is in the upper 70's.

Average life span has been increasing for a while now, and society will adapt. The idea of social security was never to enable people to spend the last 15 years of their life living on benefits. When the 65 years age limit was introduced, the average life span for a man was only a couple of years above that. What will happen now is that the retirement age will gradually increase, and we are probably going to see a unified male and female age of 70 years old by 2025.

Re:In socialist America

[martas]

no worriez. Lenin teaches forgiveness! (unless you're the royal family)

Re:In socialist America

[Eskarel]

The solution to Social Security is actually very simple. A number of other countries have already done it, including the one I live in. It's just not an idea which would be tremendously popular in the US, and especially not with Libertarians.

Here in Australia, we have mandatory superannuation(that is to say your employer is required to contribute a certain percentage of your wage to a retirement fund of your choice) and the old aged pension(our equivalent of Social Security) is means tested. Rich enough that you don't need it, then you don't get it.

Certainly if you want a more comfortable retirement you should put away additional funds, but the basic rate is enough that hopefully(this hasn't been in all that long) a lot fewer people will need the pension when the time comes. It's good that it's mandatory because it means that people(especially younger people who are less likely to negotiate hard for a 401k) are saving money which will save everyone money later.

The unpopular bit of course is that everyone pays, but not everyone gets any benefit out of it(like most government services really). This pisses off rich people(who don't generally benefit) and libertarians(who generally don't want anyone else to have any of their money), but it works quite well. The system is relatively manageable on our much lower GDP, people who need it get it, it's not going bankrupt, all of that sort of thing.

That's not to say that there aren't plenty of wasteful government projects whose only real goal is to win votes, but Social Security doesn't actually have to be.

Re:In socialist America

[Anonymous Coward]

In socialist America, children go to school and learn something useful, everyone has healthcare, the entire planet doesn't see the US as a meddling bully that resorts to violence to solve all of its problems, and technology is seen as an opportunity rather than a nuisance. Oh, the horror!

Yes but the gov't doesn't insist that God exists and it's up to you to decide if you believe in him/her/it/them and you can decide how you want to worship. Those nice intelligent healthy heathens will all go to Hell if they don't have God in their lives whether they want Him or Not.

Re:In socialist America

[dougisfunny]

The question to ask then would be "Does the average lifespan increase, have a corresponding increase in span a person is capable of working?" If people live til 90 on average, but are decrepit at 65, what then?

At least I'm curious if the able to work span increases the same as the life span.

Re:In socialist America

[ppanon]

The average life span in the US is likely to actually start dropping soon because obesity has been steadily increasing and there are many obesity-related or obesity-aggravated diseases (heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, etc.) that will work to kill off people early. Life expectancy is climbing partly based on health improvements due to lower smoking rates. Fewer unwanted babies due to legalization of abortion is probably also a factor (they would be more likely to be poorly cared for, often leading to earlier deaths that significantly affect the statistics). However, at some point in the not too distant future, those improvements are going to plateau and the effects of obesity are going to take over.

Diabetes is going to become very expensive for all those private insurers. First they'll try to dodge the costs but eventually they're going to be forced to pick up the tab and employers and employees won't be able to pay when they try to pass the costs on. At that point, faced with a shrinking market and losses (and probably a renewed push for public healthcare) it's going to be their lobbyists against the corn/agribusiness lobbies fighting it out in congress to get healthier prepared foods available for consumers (less high fructose corn syrup for starters). If they were smart, the health insurers would see the writing on the wall and start pushing for that hard now, however odds are they won't actually want to start spending money on this issue until it starts seriously hitting them in the pocket book. It'll probably be too late for about 2 generations of US citizens by the time the insurers start wising up. As for US congressmen doing the right thing by themselves, dead men don't vote or make political contributions. Certainly don't go holding your breath for the Republicans in the cornbelt to do anything.

Re:In socialist America

[smoker2]

Social security is going broke because the govt. borrowed money from it when the income was greater than the outgoings. The reason the current generation is paying for the last is to cover the repayments. Maybe if they had left it alone instead of stealing from it there wouldn't be such a crisis. It's not meant to cover more than a tenth of a lifespan, it's meant to supplement the last 10 to 15 years. But people have relied on it, which seeing as the govt. have already spent it elsewhere, was a crucial mistake. And I see no problem with the current generation paying out for the last. After all, everything around you, and your whole upbringing is due to the last generation. That is what civilisation is, looking after your elders, having respect for those who spent so much getting you to where you are now. I presume you think that anybody reaching retirement age should just be euthanised to save you money. I have a counter proposal whereby anybody who doesn't graduate with a decent degree should be killed off. If we are going to spend that much money educating, feeding, protecting and otherwise supporting the younger generation I would rather we got a decent return. Allowing idiots to progress beyond childhood is wasteful.

Yes that last bit was sarcasm, did you notice ?
I don't have kids, yet my wages are taxed just the same, in fact more than parents are. What is _my_ return ? I put money in my whole life but then tight ass newbies want to prevent me from collecting my dues. Just you wait.

Re:In socialist America

[leenks]

Except that they are building their own cloud, not buying cloud infrastructure from a supplier like Amazon. They can then offer scientists time and space (arf) on their own cloud in the same way that Amazon do with the public but without any of the issues of releasing their data onto the internet.

Besides, there are multiple definitions of "cloud computing", and your example is just one of them. Another popular one at the moment is massively parallel data processing systems with huge amounts of storage (i.e. data grids).

Re:In socialist America

[monoqlith]

The Nazis were nationalist, corporatists and social darwinists - fascists. They called themselves socialists - national socialist - but their chief ideological enemy was communist socialism. The Nazis were much closer to fascists than socialists.

Re:In socialist America

[Insightfill]

I came a little after reading this.

Disturbingly, as I read this right now, it's marked "(Score: 2, Informative)"

Where's the "+1: Too Much Informative" mod when you need it?

I assume this doesn't just include the cloud . . .

[base3]

. . . but also the rest of the sky including the moon and the stars.

Erm

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the government.

What kind of [random project variable here] project costs less than $32m?

Re:Erm

[mdm-adph]

You mean, what kind of [random project variable needing the levels of accountability and ass-covering that only $32m can provide] project costs less than $32m?

Re:Erm

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't know there was any other kind...

Re:Erm

[icebike]

There is a recession going on.

Perhaps DOE thinks this their private stimulus package.

Still, when all the screaming and whining is over and Microsoft has fired promoted the guilty at Danger, can it still be said that 32Million would have been too costly?

oh oh

[Anonymous Coward]

"The number of scientists who would benefit from mid-range computing far exceeds the amount of available resources, the DEO stated."

This sounds like one of those far-fetched statements that more realistically would be answered as "eleventy-billion."

Re:oh oh

[KingPin27]

*shuffles papers*
We have recalculated the cost as ...... what? ... uhm... eleventyone-billion dollars. Geeze-Louise Rick this can't be right are you sure?
Yup -- had Stan check them over twice.

STAN!! What the hell he works in housekeeping.

Wrong question.

[frosty_tsm]

The question is not "What kind of cloud computing project costs $32M?" The question is "Is research into the benefits of cloud computing worth $32M?"

As with many multi-million research grants, it looks less like valuable research and more like a handout.

Re:Wrong question.

[turtleAJ]

What Kind of Cloud Computing Project Costs $32M?

Obviously, a Beowulf cluster of clouds! Maybe we can call it Hurricane Computing!

Re:Wrong question.

[thefear]

As with many multi-million research grants, it looks less like valuable research and more like a handout.

Frankly I`m just suprised that the US government has a whole department dedicated to wasting energy.

Re:Wrong question.

[jcr]

Frankly I`m just suprised that the US government has a whole department dedicated to wasting energy.

Sorry to break it to you, but most government departments are dedicated to wasting energy.

-jcr

Re:Wrong question.

[Elwood P Dowd]

I don't follow. Handouts are good. We are in a liquidity trap. We have massive unemployment and a 0% interest rate. Perhaps cloud computing isn't what we should spend money on. However, the $32 million those people get for building cloud computing will very likely be spent on what those people should spend money on. Until we can raise interest rates (due to improved employment), you are either pro-government spending on crap like this, or you are a gold bug. And if you are a gold bug, you should *still* be in support of crap like this until we are either out of our liquidity trap, or we are on a gold standard. So what's the problem?

Re:Wrong question.

[megamerican]

The right question is who cares when the NSA is spending $2 billion just on the structure for a building (1 million square feet big) to house computers which will do who knows what for signals intelligence. Not to mention another facility in San Antonio being built which will be the size of the Alomodome.

Let's not care about that but nitpick over something ~1% the size and far less destructive to our liberties.

Re:Wrong question.

[frosty_tsm]

I don't follow. Handouts are good. We are in a liquidity trap.

I've never heard the term "liquidity trap" before, but yes, we do need the government to pump more money into the economy.

However, there are much more effective ways, such as improving infrastructure (see 1930s and the building projects). More jobs are created for the same amount of cash (although lower salaries as they are blue color; still means less people filing unemployment). Less money is spent on products made overseas (you make your concrete locally, but those server parts are coming from Asia). More roads are built or updated, which help the rest of the economy.

Re:Wrong question.

[Elwood P Dowd]

Clearly we should do those things first. However, those things being a better expenditure do not make this thing a bad expenditure.

Re:Wrong question.

[elvum]

This is the DoE - how about Mushroom Cloud computing?

Re:Wrong question.

[SnarfQuest]

They have to have somewhere to park the black helicopters

Re:Wrong question.

[Matheus]

It's a question that from my interpretation of the article is valid but off-base.

They are not spending 32M on *using* a cloud. They are spending 32M to *build* a cloud. That is why they specified "thousands of nehalem processors" ... they would have no knowledge of the underlying hardware if they were just talking about buying time on an existing cloud.

I could easily spend 32M on building my own cloud. Actually that wouldn't even build a very big cloud... at consumer prices (which we all know they wouldn't be paying) you spend roughly $180K for a fully loaded Dell blade chassis (16x double-quad nehalem boxes with gobs of ram and disk) Add to that rack / backup / power / etc all the costs of running the data center and the cloud computing software and your 32M gives you a nice but tiny compared to say Amazon EC2 cloud.

Re:Wrong question.

[Gorobei]

Pretty much right. Although there doesn't really need to be an ordering in time: dump money in infrastructure, public beautification projects, scientific research, social services, education.

It all is net positive while inflation remains low. Some people (mostly the rich) will always complain that "their" tax dollars are being wasted, but the real waste is that skilled workers deskill (e.g. accountants cooking their own meals, or plumbers darning their socks.) The economy is not a zero sum game.

Re:Wrong question.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm happy with a handout. Where do I sign up to play with the cloud? I've got connections. I've worked at two of the companies they're throwing money at.

Re:Wrong question.

[Anonymous Coward]

whooooooooooooooooooshhhhhhhhhhh

Re:Wrong question.

[vegiVamp]

Funny, but one has to wonder if you could run a beowulf cluster on top of the various could computing offerings. Now that'd be a truly redundant (and vendor-neutral !) cloud.

Re:Wrong question.

[michaelhood]

The right question is who cares when the NSA is spending $2 billion just on the structure for a building (1 million square feet big) to house computers which will do who knows what for signals intelligence. Not to mention another facility in San Antonio being built which will be the size of the Alomodome.

Let's not care about that but nitpick over something ~1% the size and far less destructive to our liberties.

Volume 56, Number 17 November 5, 2009

well, a book review from the future is a good enough source for me..

Depends ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hardware is not the only thing to consider. Think about all those software companies that license their stuff per core. "Thousands of cores" at $3,000 per core for software adds up.

Re:Depends ...

[Seth Kriticos]

Not really. Pretty much all the big cloud computing companies build on open source, not just because it is cheaper, but because it is also better suited for the task / more adaptable.

The application software for big science related calculations isn't exactly off the shelf either, most of it is custom made.

Once you put together this kind of project, you can also hire some developers to build a software that runs on it, and are no longer restricted by home / small business development / deployment barriers.

Government Spending

[Swanktastic]

You know, usually I'm against most government spending programs. They tend to be a huge waste.

But this... It sounds interesting and could actually benefit basic research- something this country sorely needs to support. My (perhaps incorrect) observation is that some groups like the DOE and DARPA tend to allocate funds to valuable research projects rather than pissing money away on terrible administrative database implementations. I guess I should keep in mind that the majority of DOE funding is used to build and maintain our nuclear weapons fleet.

Re:Government Spending

[maharb]

And when will everyone wake up and realize that the government isn't granted authority by the constitution it is RESTRICTED by the constitution. I.e People are not granted free speech, the government is not supposed to make a law restricting speech etc. Thus the government is allowed to do everything except what the constitution prevents it from doing.

I will now take this time to promote my agenda. Every gun law is unconstitutional. Thanks.

Re:Government Spending

[Sebastian Moran]

No the Constitution is what allows the government to function. The government can only legally do what the Constitution says it can, nothing more.

Re:Government Spending

[Anonymous Coward]

To promote the progress of science and useful arts?

Re:Government Spending

[LWATCDR]

Actually this is very reasonable. They are building their own cloud instead of maintaining many departmental clusters.
The cost is to build their own cloud that can managed and probably secured.
That is why it costs so much.

Re:Government Spending

[cetialphav]

The DOE and DARPA (and others) are huge users of HPC (high performance computing) applications. The have a vested interest in having the state of the art advance in parallel computing and so they tend to provide lots of research grants to fund that. They also routinely let outsiders use some of their computing facilities for the same reason (not all of their labs do classified work). There are many computing facilities that need enormous computing power as shown on the Top 500 list. But they are seeing that there are times where researchers need computational power, but not at such a large scale and not for long periods of time. If medium powered computational facilities could be made available to researchers cheaply and quickly, they would be widely used.

Re:Government Spending

[int69h]

You are definitely in the minority w/ that interpretation of intent. If your interpretation was indeed correct, they could have saved a lot of ink by just leaving out all clauses but 3 and 18 in Article 1, Section 8.

Sadly in practice you're correct.

Re:Government Spending

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the "waste" of government funded programs is caused by people doing their jobs properly. There are different priorities in government work, is something reliable, safe, secure. Most of the outrageous stories you hear about government waste are from contractors screwing the taxpayer, often with the complicity of corrupt politicians and not government employees.

In private industry the bottom line is money, money and money. So people cut corners and spend more effort on creating the illusion of reliability, safety and security rather than actually providing those things.

Re:Government Spending

[cetialphav]

And when will everyone wake up and realize that the government isn't granted authority by the constitution it is RESTRICTED by the constitution.

Actually, the constitution both grants and restricts the government. Congress has the authority to pass laws because the constitution grants it. The President is the commander-in-chief because the constitution grants him that authority. The constitution also restricts the scope of these powers by drawing (often vague) boundaries around those powers.

Whether individuals are granted freedoms by the constitution is often a controversial statement. When people get nominated by the Supreme Court, they are often asked if they believe there is a "right to privacy". If you think rights are granted by the constitution, then you kind of have to say no because it clearly does not say that. On the other hand, there is a line of thinking that says that individuals have inherent rights (the Declaration of Independence makes that argument) and so the constitution need not grant those rights. The bill of rights in the constitution protects those rights by explicitly constraining the government. In that thinking, a "right to privacy" may very well exist.

Re:Government Spending

[antirelic]

Your right on being against government spending programs. In fact, everything outside of maintaining national defense, diplomacy, and a few other well defined functions of federal (not national) government, are done so poorly that continuing to dump money into them is the definition of insanity. In fact, our Federal government is so bad at doing things its not suppose to do... that it cannot even do them within the frame of directly collected tax revenue (see deficit spending). For example, if we cut Social spending at a federal level (see the Constitution, reference Federalist 41 by Madison or Declaration 17 by Jefferson to dismiss the liberal myth about the "general welfare" clause)... we wouldnt need to borrow money anymore, and could start repaying the debt!!!

If there was such a great need for available cloud computing, why arent data centers popping up all over the place to support the need? 32 million dollars (equiv. to 6GBP or 10 Euro's) wont pay for more than salaries and the compete process.

Re:Government Spending

[geekoid]

funny, you were SO close.
The 2nd amendment is about the federal government can, and in the case can not do.

Meaning no where in the constitution is their a provision forcing the states to allow a right to bear arms. (amendment 10)

When taken i historical context, the 2nd admendment is even relevant anymore sice we are no longer afraid of standing armies, and have a nation guard.

That said I believe in gun ownership,and I also think a waiting period is a good thing.

Re:Government Spending

[blackraven14250]

Maybe, just maybe, they made the boundaries of the powers vague because they really didn't know exactly where all of them should be put? They may have figured some issues needed to be ironed out, and rather than make a structure taking a side, they should make a structure that would let the states and federal government figure it out along the way.

Re:Government Spending

[Stephenmg]

This sounds like a huge waste as well. Wonder who is pocketing the half that they aren't spending on the actual project. Sounds like a $600 toilet seat to me.

Re:Government Spending

[cetialphav]

I'm not complaining about the vagueness. I think it is necessary to keep up with the times. But there are many people who are very concerned about the extent to which the Commerce Clause, for example, has been stretched in the past. I suspect that our current Federal Government is much larger than most of our founding fathers would have imagined. I don't necessarily have a problem with that, but Libertarians and the Ron Paul branch of the Republican party certainly do. The vagueness in the constitution will always be a source of contention, but that gives our system a lot of flexibility.

Re:Government Spending

[Chris Burke]

When people get nominated by the Supreme Court, they are often asked if they believe there is a "right to privacy". If you think rights are granted by the constitution, then you kind of have to say no because it clearly does not say that.

By the same logic, this hypothetical justice nominee would have to say "no" to the question "is there a right to free speech?" Because the Constitution does not say that.

However "right to free speech" is just the affirmative way of saying "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech". It doesn't say you have the right to free speech, it says Congress can't make a law abridging free speech. By the same token, "right to privacy" is just the affirmative way of saying "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated".

What do you call a "right to be secure in your effects and free from unreasonable searches" if not a right to privacy?

Repeat after me

[Anonymous Coward]

The "cloud" does not exist. It's a buzzword for client-server, nothing more.

Move along.

Re:Repeat after me

[FlyingBishop]

Yeah, when I saw the headline I was prepared for a trainwreck, but this actually sounds like a really good government project. The ultimate Beowulf cluster, at the disposal of all scientists in the nation.

Large Magellanic Cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly they're trying to create the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Re:Large Magellanic Cloud

[serviscope_minor]

Wow! you totally nailed the joke!

Re:Large Magellanic Cloud

[Elbowgeek]

I, for one, would dearly love an explanation of exactly what 'cloud computing' means in this context. First the blurb goes on about what appears to be an app store, then in the next sentence seems to indicate that it exists to facilitate scientific computing needs. What the heck does one have to do with the other?

I really do dislike these nebulous, ill-defined buzz-technologies which baffle my tiny, dinosaur-like brain...

If they simulate nuclear reactions...

[PhilHibbs]

...would that be mushroom cloud computing?

$32 million?

[condour75]

With that much money they could get a quarter of an F-22 fighter jet! How dare they spend it on research?

Re:$32 million?

[maharb]

This bring up a good fucking point. Who the fuck cares about $32 million going to something useful. The government gets invoices for $500 for a screwdriver and they pay up (documented somewhere). We spend millions on each bomb dropped. The $700 billion it is going to cost to reform health care is "not important" according to the democrats. And we are bitching about $32 million that is going towards research that could be useful. Don't get me wrong I think the best way to cut government spending is to look at the details, like the $500 screwdriver thing, but for an organization as big as the US governemnt, spending $32 mill towards research that could save many times more in the future seems like a sound investment.

I really wish people would pick apart all of government spending as critically as this tiny drop in the bucket. I guess it is a much easier task to look at tiny projects and point out flaws but accepting a multibillion dollar proposal with little evidence or proof that it will work is fine.

Re:$32 million?

[Anonymous Coward]

...and keep 25% of your cynical peace-luvin' ass from being blown off by a napsack bomb on your morning mass transit event...

"I love the smell of dead Al Qaeda in the morning. It reminds me of... urban serenity."

- NYC

Re:$32 million?

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting point, how many people die in traffic accidents on their morning commute? Yeah, retard you are.

Re:$32 million?

[Anonymous Coward]

You assume the people bitching about this aren't also bitching about spending in Defense and in Health Care. The difference being only one even approaches constitutionally allowed.

Re:$32 million?

[geekoid]

correction:
documented somewhere
should be:
documented no where.

"The $700 billion it is going to cost to reform health care is "not important" according to the democrats."
no democrat has said that. they have said it will pay for itself. And from reading the bills, it looks like it will.

"I really wish people would pick apart all of government spending as critically as this tiny drop in the bucket."

I have, and do. it's not nearly as basd as people think, in act it's a hell of a lot better then private industry.

Re:$32 million?

[daveime]

I find it amusing that your solution to peace is to have bigger weapons and to fire them first, regardless of whether the "combatant" is perceived or actually there.

Re:$32 million?

[Hurricane78]

Depends. If they spend it on research to murder even more people with a F-35, priced at $500 million... then things might look different, no?

Re:$32 million?

[condour75]

Meh, we already know how to kill everybody a few times over. I'd still rather it go to research than a boring munitions buildup. Hell, even DoD gets some pretty neat things for their money, like that walking dogbot. Not to mention this here Internet we're talking on.

Just use boinc

[xgr3gx]

They should just attach to the boinc project, or a SETI like project. But I suppose they wouldn't sensitive data being copied all over the world.

Re:Just use boinc

[Anonymous Coward]

SETI actually is a part of BOINC now.

Just thought you should know.

Re:Just use boinc

[scheme]

BOINC doesn't work so well if the tasks need to download 10-20 GB of data and the actual applications running the job take up another 10GB of space and the jobs run full out on a system for 2-3 days while consuming 2GB of memory.

Re:Just use boinc

[Anonymous Coward]

GB? Such a quaint unit, and the same is becoming true of TB, but scheme is correct. There are projects out there where only the RAM is measured in GB (as in 16+GB) and datasets are measured in hundreds of TB, if not PB or larger. Back in 2003, I worked on a project which was producing 1TB/day with a prototype, and today, some projects are or will soon be producing data in excess of 40TB/day. At such dataset sizes, even moving the data around in a single computer is expensive. Just take a look at the recent work of Ivan Sutherland (of Evans & Sutherland fame), and the Asynchronous Research Center (ARC) at Portland State University. And that does not even address having to do things like doing FFTs, nearest neighbour searches, etc. for the data.

And one other problem...besides the download times involved (even with a connection to the NLR or similar backbones), DOE and DOD have datasets and algorithms which cannot just be farmed out.

"What Kind of Cloud Computing Project Costs $32M?"

[R2.0]

The kind where the company who receives the contract is located in a particular Representative's district.

Salary

[Eharley]

I imagine a large portion of that cost are salaries.

Re:Salary

[HogGeek]

Obviously you don't work for the U.S. Government or one of its contractors...

Re:Salary

[FlyingBishop]

Well, it says thousands of Nehalems, and 1-2000 will easily cost 1,000,000 for the processors alone, so the hardware could easily be 5 million.

Re:Salary

[SETIGuy]

Assuming $5M is hardware and purchased software, the remaining $27 million would get you about 150 FTE years at government salaries, benefits, and overhead rates. Assuming the project is 3 years in duration, that's 50 FTEs, which seems high for doing something of this scope. Maybe they are planning to build a building to house it.

The trouble with supercomputing

[Animats]

The trouble with supercomputing is that, if you have to share the thing, you don't need it.

Supercomputers are worth the trouble if there are applications that need hours or days of time. But if you have many users sharing the thing, it's a waste. Price/performance tends to be maximized towards the upper end of mainstream machines. Supercomputers, with their custom hardware, tend to have lower price/performance than commodity machines. That's why web farms are made of commodity hardware.

Re:The trouble with supercomputing

[starfishsystems]

The trouble with supercomputing is that, if you have to share the thing, you don't need it.

You are misinformed.

Most computer use, whether at a single workstation or a supercomputer cluster, is extremely bursty. A given user wants rapid turnaround for any particular computation, but otherwise leaves the system completely idle.

This condition explains the success of consortia like TeraGrid and WestGrid which make vast computational resources available to a large user population. Those users could not possibly afford the cost to house, develop, and maintain equivalent facilities on their own, especially when they know that such facilities would be idle most of the time.

It's also incorrect to claim that supercomputer clusters are based on custom hardware. The classical Beowulf cluster is based on commodity hardware. These clusters are commonplace. Of course this situation doesn't prevent the development of more exotic systems for more specialized purposes, for example shared memory or vector processing architectures. But again, these are much easier to justify when their resources can be shared across a community of users.

Web farms generate a completely different usage pattern. Most websites sustain a fairly steady load, or at least one which exhibits predictable, often diurnal, usage patterns that tend to balance out around the clock when serving a global client population. Such patterns are several orders of magnitude less bursty than typical cluster computing jobs. The resource management discipline is consequently very different between the two.

24th Post

[cadeon]

... the DOE stated.

Large Magellanic Cloud

[tverbeek]

Just call it the Large Magellanic Cloud

Cloud Computing Joke

[eric2hill]

What's the bright side of cloud computing?

When the cloud goes down, it's a bright and sunny day.

$32,000,000...

[corychristison]

... sounds like a walk in the park compared to their other spending. I think that number is off by a factor of 100 or so.

In contrast, my small city (~40,000 people) in central Canada is spending ~$56,000,000 on a new Multiplex/Sports center. Supposed to have a new hockey rink, curling rinks, soccer area's with artificial turf.

I'd my city council spend it on a Cloud Computing Centre.

Re:$32,000,000...

[CannonballHead]

I'd my city council spend it on a Cloud Computing Centre.

And schools to [intentionally left blank] how to use verbs in sentences.

Re:$32,000,000...

[Vectronic]

Hey, be nice... I'd my city, and accidentally all over the how to what too!

Re:$32,000,000...

[lymond01]

Not that basic research isn't a great thing, but a sports center, properly funded and located, generates income and doesn't need to be recycled every 3-4 years.

But I bet you'll find cheaper hot dogs at the Cloud Computing Center. Or centre.

Re:$32,000,000...

[geekoid]

How much will the small city get from the center?

That's the question. It's not how much money they spend it's what value does it have compared to the money.

Re:$32,000,000...

[corychristison]

How much will the small city get from the center?

That's the question. It's not how much money they spend it's what value does it have compared to the money.

Virtually nothing.

There is a much larger city 65km (40 miles) away that has much more to offer in terms of facilities and services.

Our new facility will not be able to accommodate any type of concerts, so they'll go to the other city... that also has the airport (next closest is 225km away).

Just seems like a waste of money. We do need a new Hockey and Curling facility (but have many outdoor soccer facilities). I think our council could trim some bulk off that $56 million and put it towards other things.

Oh, to top it off, we're borrowing the money from the provincial government. Which we will have to pay back... with interest.

Re:$32,000,000...

[Anonymous Coward]

If they didn't accidenty the whole thing first. What would they do?

Imagine

[Dorsai65]

Beowulf cluster of....

Oh, wait...

Never mind.

Extra cost of materials

[Crash Culligan]

The specifications for that cloud include a silver lining.

Is not cloud

[gmuslera]

is smoke, and the project was titled "Burning 32 millons"

SETI vs. Top500 supercomputing

[billstewart]

SETI works on what gets described in the trade as "embarrassingly parallel" problems - supercomputers deal with stuff that's harder to get good parallel speedup without throwing fancy hardware at it. DOE problems are often somewhere in between, and unfortunately the boinc/seti/screensaver approach to ad-hoc supercomputing isn't always good for applications like LINPAK, so it's hard to compare the real computing power. However, if you ignore that (:-), most of the top computers in the Top500 list are doing nuclear or military work, and some are for weather bureaus or Earth simulation, but about half of the last decade, the SETI people are volunteering 2-10x as much CPU just to look for little green men as the largest military supercomputers were providing. The supercomputer guys are back on top, and I don't know that we'll catch up with them again, but on the other hand some of them are now doing genetics and other Good Things instead of Evil.

Re:SETI vs. Top500 supercomputing

[MaizeMan]

I just wanted to say thanks for putting genetics in Good Things.

Re:SETI vs. Top500 supercomputing

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I know somebody that has a problem with doing that inappropriately. Ruined a perfectly good vacuum cleaner...

How about Air Traffic Control?

[DutchUncle]

When the last ATC project failed disastrously, people were already playing online games over phone modems. Now we have massively multiplayer games, with gigahertz hardware dedicated to each user (your PC, that is), and ATC is still being done on single mainframes. Quick scan suggests six thousand planes in the air at a time over the US; let's call it ten thousand. Dedicate a CPU to each plus some hierarchy of busy areas and regional control; allow $1000 per CPU/system (and its share of comm bandwidth); call it $10 million. Sounds like an interesting project. :-)

Re:How about Air Traffic Control?

[hackstraw]

Thanks for inventing distributed computing.

Re:How about Air Traffic Control?

[KZigurs]

Ok, that covers hardware side. Now find someone competent to actually write some software to analyze, spec and run the stuff, QA it, cover the transition costs and factor in maintenance costs, staff and management overhead.

Re:How about Air Traffic Control?

[DutchUncle]

that's the other $22M in "what kind of project costs $32M".

I'm envisioning distributing the hardware among the radar centers proportional to traffic within the radar range area, to maintain locality of information. The important concepts that have received much more research and practical exploration over the years include search spaces and interconnection spaces - what are the possible trajectories, who needs to know and how urgently do they need to know, and at what point should the responsibility be handed off. Between the approaches used in massively multiplayer flight/space simulations, cell phone organization, etc., I'm convinced that a robust yet cost-scalable approach can be done at the quality level required for such a life-critical application. The project started in the 1980s was still based on strongly centralized control because the distributed model had not yet been demonstrated successfully. Just as RAID proved itself, I believe distributed processing is ready for ATC.

Re:How about Air Traffic Control?

[KZigurs]

Uhm? In essence you just described the existing system with the only difference being that current process, once we ignore the IT side of it, has been refined over the years and has proven to work. Might be more automated, but as far as keeping planes in the sky, not that much of an improvement could be expected.
IIRC US has about 22ish traffic zones not accounting for local airport ones (nicely matching your 22mil to around 1m per site, suddenly it sounds on the low side) and the traffic as it actually moves is managed from them with hand-offs and whats not. National side is really more of a secondary link aggregating data for monitoring purposes.
Isn't the actual congestion points around major hubs, and even then concerns more of a runway congestion (who will be given a green to touch-down first based on schedule, conditions and amount of fuel/celebrities onboard) rather than tracking the birds in the sky?

Re:How about Air Traffic Control?

[DutchUncle]

Current process relies almost completely on human control. The equipment is bookkeeping and display. Considering when it was designed, in an era when the job was done by people with basic radar and no IFF ids, it was a tremendous aid in support of the people - but *just* a support. [When deck control told Apollo "No automated systems on Galactica, captain's orders", it resonated both ways through the timeline. :-) ]

I graduated in 1976, when dinosaurs still roamed and mainframes were all-powerful. I have also played Freespace over *audio modem* with sizeable battles tracking ships and missiles, and I've worked in embedded systems for most of the time. The laptop I'm working on right now has more horsepower than the mainframes the ATC was built on. We can distribute the problems like trajectory planning and collision probability, even duplicating work from the perspective of each plane to ensure correctness with redundancy, in ways we could never have afforded.

I wouldn't take the humans out of control: the goal is to give them a more intelligent system to oversee so they are less stressed and in top form to make decisions. I think of it like giving a shepherd highly trained sheepdogs vs. untrained mutts.

Depends on the problem

[billstewart]

There are problems which really need high memory bandwidth and don't fit on smaller-than-super computers, so a time slice on a supercomputer can be worth far more than full-time access to dedicated fast conventional computers. But those problems become less and less common as regular computers get bigger and faster - your laptop probably has a graphics processor that's faster than a Cray-2 by now...

BOINC?

[peterofoz]

We already have a platform to do this - BOINC. We've been wasting megawatts on SETI for years. Perhaps we should turn the search closer to home and just search for terrestrial intelligence, but that could be equally futile.

What cloud project costs 32 M$?

[just fiddling around]

Easy: the one where you are building the cloud.

Makes sense to me!

Re:What cloud project costs 32 M$?

[Matheus]

Exactly.

cloudy?

[doctormetal]

As the saying goes: keep your feet on the ground instead of your head in the clouds.

Re:It's Mushroom Cloud Research, not computer clou

[Anonymous Coward]

We need an "Uninformative" or "Disinformation" mod.

Every cloud has a silver lining...

[clickety6]

..although for $32 million, this cloud probably has a Tantalum lining!

Re:Every cloud has a silver lining...

[FrozenGeek]

Drat. You beat me to it.

the cloud jokes arent funny but the impending doom

[flahwho]

...is upon the clouds! Sounds more like distributive computing rather than online storage/file hosting which is really all cloud computing will amount to

Re:I assume this doesn't just include the cloud .

[Anonymous Coward]

Right probably includes
1) the cloud (i.e. all the equipment, 100GbE stuff isn't cheap)
2) the facility (that equipment has to be somewhere, even if it is a "cloud")
2a) that includes all the costs to run new utilities to the building, they don't just have buildings laying around ready to drop something like this in.
3) the power/cooling budget
4) manpower budget to set everything up
5) manpower budget to maintain and operate it

Plus it is the government so they will piss away a chunk of it.

It is always disheartening how many people have no clue what it really takes to pull off a large scale project, they think because they have a couple computers networked together in their basement it can't be that hard.

Re:It's Mushroom Cloud Research, not computer clou

[Gilmoure]

Here's a DOE Lab site. Fargin' Iceholes!

What Kind of Cloud Computing Project Costs $32M?

[SnarfQuest]

One that includes Microsoft

Costs

[awitod]

What kind? The kind that requires a building that sits on land and is full of hardware.
$32 million isn't that much when you consider that.

Here is an estimate for an empty 80000 square foot office building with no contents and no land. ~$12 million.

http://www.reedconstructiondata.com/rsmeans/models/offices3/

Stuff adds up

[travisb828]

Most people see the 32 million dollar price tag and have this knee jerk reaction. They don't take into consideration the people they will have to pay, hardware, facilities, and all that other junk that goes into a large project. I stopped getting all worked up when I learned that a project I worked on cost around 200 million.

Wohoa

[Jimbo 807]

32 mil !!! Thats nuts

Someone else's money

[Anonymous Coward]

When someone is spending someone else's money, they have very little incentive to spend it correctly. Welcome to big government.

Also, in NSW (Australia) it seems you only need one degree of separation in order to turn their fraud into failure. Our premier sits at the front of press conferences and tells us there's no more money. The corrupt front-benchers are at a different meeting and are not held accountable. And we let them off, calling them, "idiots," but I think it is it the voters who are stupid.

Re:It's Mushroom Cloud Research, not computer clou

[mhajicek]

No, what they really want to do is build Skynet.

To run recovery.gov website

[texas neuron]

I guess the 18 million dollar recovery.gov website needs a lot of horsepower to run.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2009/07/18m-being-spent-to-redesign-recoverygov-web-site.html

A government one

[dirkdodgers]

That's the answer. A government one does. That's what happens when you get to spend other people's money with no accountability to the market.

I hate clouds and care bears!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I absoultely hate the term "cloud computing" . The Internet has historically been referenced as a cloud in network diagrams since the dawn of time and the term itself is childish and conveys little meaning on its own.

Whatever happened to "grid computing" which at least sounded futurastic and had some specific technical meaning behind it?

Re:I hate clouds and care bears!!

[Troy Baer]

cloud computing = grid computing + virtualization - security - performance

A government one.

[bakemesomepie]

A government one.

Re:"What Kind of Cloud Computing Project Costs $32

[Anonymous Coward]

Brilliant, we should require the government to give contracts to companies that aren't located in any representative's district.

How do we get there from here?

[rlglende]

We are a country who has been continuously at war for many years. We spend more on national defense than all the other countries put together. We have troops in 130 countries in the world. We have treaties pledging to defend most of them.

We are deeply in debt, and project deficits > $1T for years.

The majority of our Congress is owned by the military-intelligence-industrial complex, Wall Street, police agencies and the prison industry.

Money always can buy power, and otherwise power does what it wants.

So, the idea that we will have mere socialism is silly: We have a fascist version.

my first answer to the original post..

[pjr.cc]

"a small one"....

Not that much, actually...

[tjstork]

32M sounds like a giant chunk of change, but, its not even what gets spent on FireFox each year.

You figure a 50 man team of senior devs for a year, and I think that would pretty much do it.

What a stupid post title.

[unity100]

'what kind of cloud computing project costs $32 mil' it says.

hell. even the bare costs of the number of servers that would be required to run a cloud of that size would amount to a goodly portion of that $32 mil. EVEN if you buy them in bulk. thats leaving out everything else including the datacenter setup, software, administrators, engineers, the team to create the project.

doh. i suppose cloud computing comes free, in the universe the article poster lives in.

Hey, AC, I've worked there

[billstewart]

I'm not saying that just for disinformation, though I do think that Weapons of Mass Destruction are Bad Things - I've worked there on data network consulting applications. When I said not to confuse tool-building with pork-barrel, that was a response to somebody else who said that spending $32M on a cloud-computer was pork-barrel.

While there are a few people at DOE who do graphics or computing just because it's cool, or because almost nobody else who does high-security computing research does it on supercomputers, they mostly view computing as a tool to do science and/or engineering. They're trying to model nuclear explosions, and it takes a lot of computing horsepower to do that.

And the "Imagine What You Could Do With A Cray" poster on their walls was cool, but when there's only one broadband cable system to get data across campus, back when 10Mbps Ethernet was still fast, and a few thousand people imagining what they can do with that Cray, networking problems get really hairy.

But yeah, apparently somebody else had made the mushroom cloud joke a bit earlier than I had. Didn't say anything useful about their computing environment, though.