Here we expand the high level terms of Eq.1:

A. Cost

(5)

Here,

(6)

is the total life cycle cost of the system. [$]

It includes the following costs:

One Time Costs [$] Initial hardware Initial software (system and purchased application software) Non-standard or specialized facility equipment (e.g., water cooling) Facility preparation (electrical and other building modification) Installation

Recurring Costs [$/yr] Hardware maintenance (repair and preventive) Software maintenance (repair and preventive) Facility maintenance Hardware and software upgrades (as required by contracted goals) Electrical costs (for system and cooling)17 Space and standard facility equipment (GSA or other rate per sq-ft per year)

is the total lifetime administration costs.

n_adm is average number of personnel at the local institution supporting system maintenance and management, user assistance, and system workload optimization. c_adm is the cost per person-year [$/person-year] of this support. These costs are in large measure affected by the workload environment as well as the system and its administration tools. n_adm is the personnel load that System-level and Administration Productivity Benchmarks can aim to measure along with E_adm. n_adm can be broken into two parts, one that is a baseline cost in the host environment for managing a system of this magnitude, and a part that corresponds to the effort to optimize utilization and other activities where the administrators' productivity can be affected by administrative tools, . [Persons]

N is the total number, over the lifetime T, of unique program activities (projects with the goal of creating an appropriately efficient program and a correct and useful result). The definition of program activities and an estimate of N is very dependent on the local environment and should come from the institution for which systems are being evaluated. [Dimensionless]

is the average total project personnel time for one of the unique program activities counted by N. This includes, in addition to the software development effort, personnel costs for any production related effort (e.g., job submission, bookkeeping, etc.). This, along with E_job, is what Job-level Productivity Benchmarks should aim to measure for different environments and systems. [Person-years]

c_proj is the average cost per person-year of all project-related personnel. [$/Person-year]

Alternatively, we can write project costs in terms of the average total number of project personnel, n_proj, over the lifetime, T, so that the total project cost is .