D2 3 Computing e-Infrastructure cost calculations and business _models_vam1-final

e-­‐FISCAL: www.efiscal.eu
EC Contract Number: 283449
Please indicate the period in number of years that corresponds to the average useful economic life
(depreciation period) of the following assets according to the policy followed by the NGI site/ HPC Centre.
Answer Options Min Max Average Median
Average useful life in years for CPUs 3 10 4.9 5
Average useful life in years for tape storage devices 3 12 6.5 5
Average useful life in years for disk storage devices 3 20 5.6 5
Table 20: Useful life information
Analysing Table 20 allows us to make an interesting observation. Typically the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
exercises use primarily a four year duration (e.g. Walker (2009) and Magellan report (2011) and sometimes a
three year duration (e.g. Nazir and Sørensen (2010)) – as the useful lifetime of a CPU. In our sample the median
useful life to calculate annual depreciation is five years. This has a non-­‐negligible impact on the capital costs
accounted each year in order to form the total yearly cost. It also has significant effects on electricity consumption
as older machines consume more electricity. Nevertheless, there are instances of long depreciation periods which
will require deeper study to understand the underlying conditions that permit such a treatment.
Cost relations over investment
In order to assess several other cost parameters that are related to CAPEX but at the same time are not easily
identifiable and measurable, we asked respondents to provide indications on their relative size compared to the
computing and storage investment. As these estimations were expected to be rough, respondents were given the
flexibility instead of identifying a sole number (in our case percentage) to indicate a range of values (e.g. between
10%-­‐20%). Therefore the following numbers are considered as high-­‐level approximations.
Estimated cost relations of several parameters on computing and hardware storage
Min Max Average Median
Please present an overall estimation of the related
interconnect equipment costs (network devices, cables, etc.)
as a percentage of the hardware acquisition cost* 0% 30% 10% 9%
Please present an overall estimation of the support contract
costs (e.g. next-­‐business-­‐day hardware support costs) as a
percentage of the hardware (CPUs and storage devices)
acquisition cost ** 0% 25% 6% 4%
If you were to equip the existing NGI site/ HPC Centre now
what would be the investment cost of all auxiliary equipment
as percentage of the cost of acquiring computing and
hardware storage capacity*** 5% 35% 18% 20%
Please make an estimation of the total cost of the related
software (e.g. operating system, fabric layer / file system
software (e.g. LSF, GPFS), software support contract costs,
applications cost, 3rd party software cost, compilers, etc.) as
a percentage of the hardware (CPUs and storage devices)
acquisition cost 0% 15% 4% 2%
e-­‐FISCAL : Financial Study for Sustainable Computing e-­‐Infrastructures
Deliverable D2.3 – Computing e-­‐Infrastructures cost estimation and analysis – Pricing and
Business models
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