A Full-Cost Model for Estimating the Energy Consumption of Computing Infrastructures

Since its advent in the middle of the 2000’s, the Cloud Computing (CC) paradigm is increasingly advertised as a price-effective solution to many IT problems. This seems reasonable if we exclude the pure performance point of view as many studies highlight a non-negligible overhead induced by the virtualization layer at the heart of every Cloud middleware when subjected to an High Performance Computing (HPC) workload. When this is the case, traditional HPC and Ultrascale computing systems are required, and then comes the question of the real cost-effectiveness, especially when comparing to instances offered by the Cloud providers. In this section, and inspired by the work proposed in [1], we propose a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis of an in-house academic HPC facility of medium-size (in particular the one operated at the University of Luxembourg since 2007, or within the Grid’5000 project [2]), and compare it with the investment that would have been required to run the same platform (and the same workload) over a competitive Cloud IaaS offer.