[madmax96]

It's not necessarily about the machine's raw performance, but capacity. The compute is a shared utility, and the utilization of supercomputer is quite high. We expect science to grow exponentially. So, compute demand grows exponentially too. The cloud is crazy expensive compared to supercomputing -- you don't want missing compute to hold back research.

[dekhn]

If science grows exponentially (rather than linearly or sublinearly), you're screwed.

I don't think the cloud is expensive compared to supercomputing- so long as you consider TCO and you're doing proper deal negotiation. I would much rather than an evergreen cluster in the cloud with fast interconnect that I turn on for myself and shutdown when I'm done, than share some resource and try to keep utilization high.