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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."
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.
...would that be mushroom cloud computing?
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
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
With that much money they could get a quarter of an F-22 fighter jet! How dare they spend it on research?
The kind where the company who receives the contract is located in a particular Representative's district.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Just call it the Large Magellanic Cloud
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
I'd my city council spend it on a Cloud Computing Centre.
And schools to [intentionally left blank] how to use verbs in sentences.
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. :-)
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.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
and remember, kids: this thread was brought to you by a 40-year-old DARPA project.
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!
weinersmith
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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They have to have somewhere to park the black helicopters
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.