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The landscape of research in science and engineering is heavily reliant on computation and data processing. There is continued and expanded usage by disciplines that have historically used advanced computing resources, new usage by disciplines that have not traditionally used HPC, and new modalities of the usage in Data Science, Machine Learning, and other areas of AI. Along with these new patterns have come new advanced computing resource methods and approaches, including the availability of commercial cloud resources. The Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC) has long been an advocate representing the needs of academic researchers using computational resources, sharing best practices and offering advice to create a national cyberinfrastructure to meet US science, engineering, and other academic computing needs. CASC has completed the first of what we intend to be an annual survey of academic cloud and data center usage and practices in analyzing return on investment in cyberinfrastructure. Critically important findings from this first survey include the following: many of the respondents are engaged in some form of analysis of return in research computing investments, but only a minority currently report the results of such analyses to their upper-level administration. Most respondents are experimenting with use of commercial cloud resources but no respondent indicated that they have found use of commercial cloud services to create financial benefits compared to their current methods. There is clear correlation between levels of investment in research cyberinfrastructure and the scale of both cpu core-hours delivered and the financial level of supported research grants. Also interesting is that almost every respondent indicated that they participate in some sort of national cooperative or nationally provided research computing infrastructure project and most were involved in academic computing-related organizations, indicating a high degree of engagement by institutions of higher education in building and maintaining national research computing ecosystems. Institutions continue to evaluate cloud-based HPC service models, despite having generally concluded that so far cloud HPC is too expensive to use compared to their current methods.
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This content will become publicly available on August 21, 2026
Application of the cyberinfrastructure production function model to R1 institutions
High-performance computing (HPC) is widely used in higher education for modeling, simulation, and AI applications. A critical piece of infrastructure with which to secure funding, attract and retain faculty, and teach students, supercomputers come with high capital and operating costs that must be considered against other competing priorities. This study applies the concepts of the production function model from economics with two thrusts: (1) to evaluate if previous research on building a model for quantifying the value of investment in research computing is generalizable to a wider set of universities, and (2) to define a model with which to capacity plan HPC investment, based on institutional production—inverting the production function. We show that the production function model does appear to generalize, showing positive institutional returns from the investment in computing resources and staff. We do, however, find that the relative relationships between model inputs and outputs vary across institutions, which can often be attributed to understandable institution-specific factors.
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- PAR ID:
- 10636433
- Editor(s):
- Zhang, Yi
- Publisher / Repository:
- Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics
- Volume:
- 10
- ISSN:
- 2504-0537
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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