I used SDSC before. Buying the machines on SDSC isn't cheap, it's like $10k per node, but they do offer a good ideal on storage called universal storage which costs roughly $1000 per month for a minimum of 200TB. But yeah, for hosting private nodes in SDSC you have to beware of the extra cost of maintenance for hiring SDSC consultants. For shared compute infrastructure in SDSC, you have to deal with the fact where you don't have root permission, which can be a pain when you need it urgently.

Anyhow, I highly recommend using resumable spot instances from AWS and setting the max bid price to 1/5 of the on-demand-cost. It's probably the least problematic solution that yields the most availability with lowest cost. Most labs I know are migrating to the AWS now.

I have written a blog for this kind of things, feel free to check it if you are interested: https://brianyiktaktsui.wordpress.com/2018/08/11/buying-computing-infrastructure-vs-adopting-the-cloud/