[cing]

Definitely agree. To give a ballpark figure, Compute Canada, the governing HPC body in Canada provided a cost estimate to researchers who applied and received dedicated computer allocation. Although, all this computer time is actually "free" to the scientist:

"The average RAC award in 2012 was 500 core years and 50 TB years. From Penguin Computing's website [list pricing from Feb 10th, 2012] the cost to purchase a similar amount of computational time and ability would be $450,000. ($600 / server month where each server provides 8 cores) To purchase 50 TB from SDSC [again, list pricing from Feb 10th, 2012] it would cost $30,000. ($600 / TB Year) Making the total value of the average RAC award nearly $500,000. The cost to Compute Canada to provide this level of award is $178,000 and that includes all aspects of user support, training and other aspects not covered by commercial clouds." (https://computecanada.ca/index.php/en/component/content/arti...)

As a side-note, my groups award was above the average, The email to our research group stated: "Providing these resources to your research group costs Compute Canada roughly $4,669,960." I don't even want to calculate how much that would cost on EC2!

[bbgm]

500 cores is approximately 32 cc2.8xlarge instances (16 cores/instance). If you are running a highly utilized cluster, i.e. you are going for a one year heavy utilization reserved instance, the compute part is going to cost you ~$262,000. If you went with a 3-yr RI, it would be $183,000/yr.

Or to put it differently, ~$0.04/core-hr prior to any volume discounts.