“over sufficiently long timeframes, all costs are variable costs”. CapEx vs OpEx is an accounting distinction, and a short-term optimization question. It’s not fundamental.
How this works in practice, for large computational challenges, is that there is a curve for how much advance work reduces the per-iteration cost of the actual results. Where you want to be on this curve depends on the specifics of the prep (algorithmic improvements, better caching or parallelism (note: these are often optimizing in opposite directions), hardware improvements or tuning, etc.). Each of these dimensions has it’s own curve, and we often don’t know in advance what the curve actually looks like, so there’s a meta-curve we guess at about R&D vs implementation excellence for each topic.
It gets very complex very quickly, in ways that’s difficult to numerically model, because different problems are JUST different enough not to reuse some of the investments OR meta-investments.
As I often say at work, “that’s why they pay us the medium bucks”.
“over sufficiently long timeframes, all costs are variable costs”. CapEx vs OpEx is an accounting distinction, and a short-term optimization question. It’s not fundamental.
How this works in practice, for large computational challenges, is that there is a curve for how much advance work reduces the per-iteration cost of the actual results. Where you want to be on this curve depends on the specifics of the prep (algorithmic improvements, better caching or parallelism (note: these are often optimizing in opposite directions), hardware improvements or tuning, etc.). Each of these dimensions has it’s own curve, and we often don’t know in advance what the curve actually looks like, so there’s a meta-curve we guess at about R&D vs implementation excellence for each topic.
It gets very complex very quickly, in ways that’s difficult to numerically model, because different problems are JUST different enough not to reuse some of the investments OR meta-investments.
As I often say at work, “that’s why they pay us the medium bucks”.