Summary: Discusses the issue of justifying the costs of acquiring resources or of adopting services.
Justifying the cost of investing in advanced ICTs can be difficult as the effects are often long-term and indirect. The cost may relate to the provision of resources but also to the costs of adopting services, which can be significant even when the resource is free at the point of use.
High performance computing is expensive, and I think it’s difficult to justify from a research point of view why a large amount of money is needed maybe to perform calculations in one day rather than five. It may not seem very significant but it’s the cumulative effect. (information systems professional)