[idiot900]

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.

[boldlybold]

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]

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

[perihelions]

Also lost a customer for life here. In my case they asked to let an AI scan my face through a webcam.

Nah.

[adgjlsfhk1]

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

[chrisseaton]

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

[lostmsu]

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]

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]

> prohibits me from using its funds for capital acquisitions

What is a legitimate reason for this restriction?

[Fomite]

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_]

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.

[Fomite]

Not really - this is also true for things with no particular "civilian" use.

[blep_]

Yes, that's why I described it as "overly broad".

[Fomite]

But it's also not why the law was made.

There are other regulations to keep people from installing Steam on their ML workstations (which also cover machines below the threshold).

It's entirely about one grant-giving entity not wanting to pay for a piece of capital equipment that will have use beyond the project they're funding. It's a federal regulation, and it comes up far more commonly with lab equipment than it ever does with computers.