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idiot900 | 3 years ago

This rings true for me. I have a federal grant that prohibits me from using its funds for capital acquisitions: i.e. servers. But I can spend it on AWS at massive cost for minimal added utility for my use case. Even though it would be a far better use of taxpayer funds to buy the servers, I have to rent them instead.

discuss

boldlybold|3 years ago

Lots of places (Hetzner for example) will rent you servers at 10-25% the cost of AWS if you want dedicated hardware, without the ability to autoscale. You can even set up a K8s cluster there if the overhead is worth it.

intelVISA|3 years ago

Fond memories of Hetzner asking for my driving license as ID for renting a $2 VPS. Lost a customer for life with that nonsense.

adgjlsfhk1|3 years ago

Can you get your university to buy some servers for unrelated reasons and have them rent them to you?

chrisseaton|3 years ago

Well that’s just rebuilding AWS badly. I’ve used academic-managed time-sharing setups and have some horror stories.

lostmsu|3 years ago

Doesn't have to be a university either. Depending on the amount of compute needed any capable IT guy can do it for you from their garage with a contract.

giantrobot|3 years ago

I'm not saying AWS is automatically the best option but the question isn't just servers. It's servers, networking hardware, HVAC, a facility to put them all in, and at least a couple people to run and maintain it all. The TCO of some servers is way higher than the cost of the hardware.

testplzignore|3 years ago

> prohibits me from using its funds for capital acquisitions

What is a legitimate reason for this restriction?

Fomite|3 years ago

Basically, the granting organization doesn't want to pay for the full cost of capital equipment that will - either via time or capacity - not be fully used for that grant.

There are other grant mechanisms for large capital expenditures.

The problem is the thresholds haven't shifted in a long time, so you can easily trigger it with a nice workstation. But then, the budget for a modular NIH R01 was set in 1999, so thats hardly a unique problem.

blep_|3 years ago

I can think of a few ways to abuse it while still spinning it as "for research". The obvious one is to buy a $9999 gaming machine with several of whatever the fanciest GPU on the market is at the time, and say you're doing machine learning.

So my guess is it's an overly broad patch for that sort of thing.