The Magellan Final Report on Cloud Computing for Science

1. Findings:  Cost Analysis shows that DOE centers are cost competitive, typically 3–7x less expensive, when compared to commercial cloud providers.
2. Reasons: Existing DOE centers already achieve many of the benefits of cloud computing since these centers consolidate computing across multiple program offices, deploy at large scales, and continuously refine and improve operational efficiency

Evaluating the Suitability of Commercial Clouds for NASA’s High Performance Computing Applications: A Trade Study

1. Finding 1:
   Tightly-coupled, multi-node applications from the NASA workload take somewhat more time when run on cloud-based nodes connected with HPC-level interconnects; they take significantly more time when run on cloud-based nodes that use conventional, Ethernet-based interconnects.
2. Finding 2:
   The per-hour full cost of HECC resources is cheaper than the (compute-only) spot price of similar resources at AWS and significantly cheaper than the (compute-only) price of similar resources at POD.
3. Finding 3:
   Commercial clouds do not offer a viable, cost-effective approach for replacing in-house HPC resources at NASA