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Costs

Costs

How many direct costs for compute, storage, network costs are borne by the researcher? Issues include both short-term (while doing the study and analysis) and long-term costs for storage; cost of curation and organizing data, both the data you are generating and the output; cost of complying and using standards; and cost of computing.

Best Practices:

  • Use available tools to estimate storage and compute costs of the project.
  • Plan for ongoing costs.
  • Determine whether subsidies are available from the institution, granting agencies or other sources.
  • Remember  that commercial cloud costs are “Pay as you go.”
  • Estimate on the high side—include a cushion

Things to Avoid:

  • Paying to store additional copies of data
  • Not taking advantage of archival/"cold" storage
  • Not accounting for network costs associated with copying data 
  • Not accounting for access costs or not taking advantage of "requester pays" capabilities
  • Forgetting to turn off machine you are not using
  • Not accounting for the free-tier of compute resources

Value Set Definitions: 

  • Low: Relative low costs ($10,000 or less) 
  • Medium: Greater than $10,000, but less than $25,000 
  • High: $25,000 or more

Value of Use Case Example:

High - The amount of data and length of store and compute demands are likely to be considerable.

Discussion of Use Case:

Jordan will either need to ensure prospectively that her budget includes sufficient resources for all planned cloud computing and storage costs, or determine whether she will have sufficient budget for the duration of the project and all needs before embarking on the use of cloud computing and storage. If her budget did not initially cover these costs, there may be additional institutional or federal funds available to do so that she could pursue. It will be particularly important for Jordan to plan for costs that will be needed throughout the life of the project, including any longer term archiving or sharing costs.

See Also:

  • Running Neuroimaging Applications on Amazon Web Services: How, When, and at What Cost?
    • https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/RequesterPaysBuckets.html