Magellan Final Report - Office of Science - U.S. Department of Energy

Magellan Final Report
Inherently, the move to cloud computing is a business decision in which the business case should
consider the relevant factors some of which include readiness of existing applications for cloud
deployment, transition costs and life-cycle costs, maturity of service orientation in existing infrastructure,
and other factors including security and privacy requirements.
Cost-saving benefits from cloud computing depends on a number of factors and will need to be analyzed
carefully for each scenario. The NIST document echoes this thought, “Whether or not cloud computing
reduces overall costs for an organization depends on a careful analysis of all the costs of operation, compliance,
and security, including costs to migrate to and, if necessary, migrate from a cloud.” Our detailed performance
analysis, use case studies, and cost analysis shows that DOE HPC centers are significantly more cost-effective
than public clouds for many scientific workloads, but this analysis should be reevaluated for other use cases
and workloads.
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