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There is a lot of buzz about cloud computing. Recently, this has spilled over into the HPC world. There are private and public clouds. And private clouds at external organization or internal to your own organization. I do not have the gist of it down yet, but this page explores the option: can or should we consider HPC cloud instead of spending our $298K NSF award on cloud computing or stay the course.
First we need to assess our usage of our clusters and if the cloud can support that. We also need to stress that we are small liberal arts college, primarily undergraduate, with less than 3,000 students and perhaps 450 active faculty. We do not need to do cloud computing because were going to scale upwards to 10,000 nodes. We also have a relatively small cluster user base, representing many different interests groups as opposed to one large community using a small set of tools. Examples: