Financial Study for Sustainable Computing e-Infrastructures

Over the last ten years the European countries and the EC have made significant investments in e-Infrastructures for scientific computing, notably High Throughput Computing (HTC) and High Performance Computing (HPC) services. Their contribution in pushing the European research towards a leading position in addressing global challenges has been validated by a growing number of research initiatives, most notably the ESFRI projects. Sustainability of such services is crucial, as the research supported by them is more and more crucial for European competitiveness – and sustainability can be planned better if the costs are known. The emerging commercial offerings (Cloud-based HTC and HPC solutions) pose additional challenges and opportunities for sustainability. They represent new ways of explicit monetisation of computing and open the way to new business models (e.g. service fees or of lease industrial resources). The upcoming next framework programme and broader EU policies depend on more careful impact assessment, which requires accurate cost estimates. Similarly energy saving and green computing will be increasingly relevant, and project results will also allow estimating potential benefits in these areas. It is thus vital to understand the cost of the dedicated computing related e-Infrastructures, as expressed by EGI and PRACE initiatives. The calculation of such costs is not trivial; keeping detailed accounting data for the evolving mix of capital (hardware) and operational (personnel, energy) expenditures is only one of the challenges. The scope of the e-FISCAL proposal is to analyse such costs, facilitated by national entities (NGIs and HPC centres), compare them with equivalent commercial leased or on-demand offerings and provide an evaluation report. The execution of the survey builds on a small-scale survey conducted by the e-IRGSP2 project that proved the complexity of the issue and provided tacit knowledge valuable for the e-FISCAL project.