When you ask your funding agency for an HPC upgrade or a new machine, the first thing they will want from you are utilisation numbers of current infrastructure. The second thing they will ask is why you don't just apply for time on a bigger machine.
Despite the clichés, spending taxpayer money is really hard. In fact my impression is always that the fear that resources get misused is a major driver of the inefficient bureaucracies in government. If we were more tolerant of taxpayer money being wasted we could spend it more efficiently. But any individual instance of misuse can be weaponized by those who prefer for power to stay in the hands of the rich...
At least where I'm from, new HPC clusters aren't really asked for by the users, but they are "infrastructure projects" of their own.
With the difficulty of spending taxpayer money, I fully agree. I even think HPC clusters are a bit of a symptom of this. It's often really hard to buy a beefy enough workstation of your own that would fit the bill, or to just buy time from cloud services. Instead you have to faff with a HPC cluster and its bureaucracy, because it doesn't mean extra spending. And especially not doing a tender, which is the epitome of the inefficiency caused by the paranoia of wasted spending.
I've worked for large businesses, and it's a lot easier to spend in those for all sorts of useless stuff, at least when the times are good. When the times get bad, the (pointless) bureaucracy and red tape gets easily worse than in gov organizations.
> At least where I'm from, new HPC clusters aren't really asked for by the users, but they are "infrastructure projects" of their own.
Because the users expect them to be renewed and improved. Otherwise the research can’t be done. None of our users tell us to buy new systems. But they cite us like mad, so we can buy systems every year.
Despite the clichés, spending taxpayer money is really hard. In fact my impression is always that the fear that resources get misused is a major driver of the inefficient bureaucracies in government. If we were more tolerant of taxpayer money being wasted we could spend it more efficiently. But any individual instance of misuse can be weaponized by those who prefer for power to stay in the hands of the rich...