Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is often asked about when comparing two different compute options but when it comes to using the cloud for simulations, it’s not truly about cost but rather value gained. There are many benefits that are more valuable than money in this context: ability, agility, competitiveness, innovation etc., for which you may need HPC or cloud facilities. The philosophy of the cloud isn’t to provide a system that you’d host in-house. The cloud provides temporary use of a different kind of resource to that which you already have.

In this article Benchmark Commissioning Editor Althea de Souza invited Lee Margetts (chairman of the NAFEMS HPC working group), Andrew Jones, Wolfgang Gentzsch, Rodney Mach and John Baxter to discuss the issues around the total cost of running simulations in the cloud or in an on-site facility.