What Does Grid Computing Cost?

Abstract

Grid computing has gained considerable attention in research and industry. High expectations are associated with the approach. However, so far only few papers have been published about the costs caused by Grid computing. In this article we pursue two main goals: to analyze the different types of costs and to determine the total costs of a resource provider. Our approach is based on the discussion of general cost categories that have to be taken into account. We give concrete numbers for the different categories and use these numbers to estimate the costs in two real life Grids: the EGEE project and the Grid of the pharmaceutical company Novartis. A summarizing discussion concludes the paper.

Services Grids in Industry – On-Demand Provisioning and Allocation of Grid-Based Business Services

“…According to Blau et al (2008), $1 per CPU-hour equals the break-even if the organization's data centers are little utilized. If the resource utilization of the organization is constantly high, the adoption of Grid technology and the development of one's own Grid infrastructure can lead to total costs lower than $1 per CPU-hour (Opitz et al 2008). Otherwise, without consistently high levels of utilization, the costs per CPU and hour are higher than $1.…”

“…Accordingly, the two alternatives (building your own Grid infrastructure versus sourcing resources from a third-party provider) have to be analyzed anew for each organization (Opitz et al 2008). Nevertheless, especially for small companies without the financial opportunity to invest in their own Grid infrastructure, the on-demand use of utility computing resources can open up new business models (Schneider 2006) due to the lower total cost of ownership (Altmann and Routzounis 2006).…”

“…Since virtualization technology primarily aims at putting into effect cost savings, it is quite astonishing that the quantification of costs incurred in Grid solutions has been badly neglected by scientific research so far. To the best of our knowledge, only Gray (2003) and Opitz et al (2008) explicitly assess the costs of Grid systems. While Gray (2003) chooses an approach which is based on rather rough estimates to point out that Grid applications have to be very compute-intensive with respect to a minimum of input data in order to operate in an economical manner, Opitz et al (2008) elaborate on expressing the total costs of ownership (TCO) of Grid through an explicit formula.…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, only Gray (2003) and Opitz et al (2008) explicitly assess the costs of Grid systems. While Gray (2003) chooses an approach which is based on rather rough estimates to point out that Grid applications have to be very compute-intensive with respect to a minimum of input data in order to operate in an economical manner, Opitz et al (2008) elaborate on expressing the total costs of ownership (TCO) of Grid through an explicit formula. Therefore, several cost categories (hardware, business premises including electricity, software, personnel, data communication) are taken into account.…”

“…The authors distinguish between already utilized systems where idle time is used (cycle stealing) and designated Grid systems with no other utilization. In all cases the costs of the commercial offers equal or undercut the costs of the relevant self-developed systems (Opitz et al 2008).…”