Regarding ROI for academia. My background is in computational molecular thermodynamics and in my ~10 yr academic research career I logged millions of core-hours and contributed to ~100 publications. During that time, I can definitely say that my time-to-publication or publication output was not significantly impacted by the HPC resources to which I had access. The largest factors was the speed at which my advisor could respond with his/her revisions. Second to that, was my success rate in acquiring grants.
Furthermore a few of my publications required nearly zero core-hours but earned a relatively large Impact Factor. On the other hand, some publications used tons of core-hours and were probably never even read by other researchers. Generally, I would use as much cluster time as I could get my hands on. The total mass of hardware to which I had access was directly related to the absolute problem size and number of data points generated, not the number or quality of my publications. FWIW, in our industry (HPC OnDemand), calculating ROI is almost trivial. -- Kevin Van Workum, PhD Sabalcore Computing Inc. www.sabalcore.com --
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