What Kind of Cloud Computing Project Costs $32M? 158
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."
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
$32 million? (Score:5, Insightful)
With that much money they could get a quarter of an F-22 fighter jet! How dare they spend it on research?
"What Kind of Cloud Computing Project Costs $32M?" (Score:3, Insightful)
The kind where the company who receives the contract is located in a particular Representative's district.
Re:Government Spending (Score:2, Insightful)
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:Wrong question. (Score:4, Insightful)
The right question is who cares when the NSA is spending $2 billion [nybooks.com] 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.
$32,000,000... (Score:3, Insightful)
... 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:In socialist America (Score:3, Insightful)
Plus the thousands of other reasonable-sounding government funded projects that cost less than a dollar per taxpayer...
Re:In socialist America (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In socialist America (Score:5, Insightful)
and remember, kids: this thread was brought to you by a 40-year-old DARPA project.
Re:Government Spending (Score:4, Insightful)
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. [top500.org] 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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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:In socialist America (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In socialist America (Score:3, Insightful)
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.