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IBM Wants CPU Time To Be A Metered Utility
kwertii writes "IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano announced a sweeping new business strategy yesterday, pledging $10,000,000,000 towards redefining computing as a metered utility. Corporate customers would have on-demand access to supercomputer-level resources, and would pay only for time actually used. The $10 billion is slated for acquisitions and research to put the supporting infrastructure in place. Will this model revolutionize the way companies compute, or is this plan doomed to be another PCjr?"
Ballpoint pens proclaimed "the wave of the future".
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
It will be tought getting quarters and dimes in the floppy slot. Or is that a cupholder?
GetTheJob.com : Nothing but Real Jobs.
Waah! Must find a way to get the world back into the 1960s! Bring back glass houses and lab coats!
This won't revolutionize anything... I remember this when it was called timesharing on mainframes. The revolution was moving away from that model...
"Timesharing" back in the early days of computing. I always assumed too that this was the bank's way of justifying the abominable practice of charging ATM fees.
Why do I M2 everything negatively?
Maybe this is the plan for Palladium... set up a "trusted" system and then use your Passport account to charge you by the bit.
"time sharing." Remember that? Remember what a horrible, miserable death it rightfully died when PCs got cheap enough to include in Cracker Jacks boxes?
Here's hoping it STAYS dead!
It was an unsuccessful new kind of computer back in 1983. I owned on and they were cool. It is relevant because it was also by IBM and it failed.
It will be a revolution until Linux becomes mainstream on the desktop and every computer on the corporate LAN is part of a cluster, when users log off the computer re-joins the cluster. Companies should look at what they already have before shelling out more money.
As long as IBM doesn't change the rates for processing in conjunction with Moore's law, making the processing cheaper on their end, there could be quite a boost in profits from their current business model simply selling the hardware.
But then again, one of the reasons that Enron went down is that they quit selling real, hard, physical commodities and instead went directly to a more ethereal model of paper sales and transactions.
that I'll have to pay everytime I check my email? Imagine the bills for the Evercrack players.
. SLASHDOT: Home of the vicious nerd.
or is this plan doomed to be another PCjr
Where can I sign up to get time on the PCjr cluster farm?
traditionally IBM giving X million dollars to Y
just means that they donate hardware, the intrinsic value of which is calculated by...IBM
How is this revolutionary. IBM oporated this way for years up to and following the advent of the PC. This is just a cyclical evolution much like dumb terminals to thin clients.
Back to 1960.
You have no chance of survive. Make your time.
Cats
This is not offtopic. The grandparent said that it would be hard to get coins into the computer, and I pointed out that the idea of computers being a metered utility implies that people would be billed each month. From that one can conclude that this person still lives with his parents.
this is old. This is how it used to be back in the 1970s when "personal computer" meant something akin to a radio with flashing lights. Bill Gates and his friends even used one of these pay-for-cpu-time computers at their school (they used up all the paid-for time btw).
So will this move the ball towards corporate responsibility in this area?
I am certain that a lot of companies will try to avoid it if at all possible. Of course, this would be controversial, especially re: open source, etc. but it is not the most common practice now.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
It's called "The Internet".
In the mainframe world cpu cycles are already a potential billable transaction..
So the concept is old and crusty..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Is this a hint that the industry has finaly figured out how to get the bugs out of software?
Samuel J. Palmisano announced a sweeping new business strategy yesterday, pledging $10,000,000,000
I think Samuel has been watching Austin Powers way too much.
Maybe you should educate the morons of tomorrow so they'll stop believing the leaders of tomorrow. - Dogbert
I may have to start paying for my porn!!!
Isn't this the same business model that IBM used in the days of yore?
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943
The old rulers of IBM figured that they would just rent out their computer time to do those big jobs of the rest of the world.
Seems like this is an old idea, not a new one.
-C
- Sighuh?
If the huge false start that was Application Service Providers showed anything it is that corporate customers don't trust computing resources that are outside their control. It doesn't matter if IBM can provide a better service or a more reliable one, it just doesn't feel that way - and the IT guys will never report favorably on something that will put them out of a job.
It's PCjr, it's Gavilan, it's all kind of failures. And $10,000,000,000!
Timeshare for one and all...just be sure you hook up with our new and improved USB chicklett keyboard....
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
I wonder how much it'll cost to play a few hours of solitaire on a super computer? It'll play so fast, I bet the cards will catch fire when they bounce across the screen...
for companies and institutions that use a lot of heavy computation.
It takes a lot of time, space and know-how to own and maintain big-@ss computers. With broadband connections being commonplace, you could run your own progam remotely, and let a specialist (like IBM) handle all that stuff. And of course, there is value unlocked by having multiple users share common resources.
Of course, the vast majority of companies and institutions (not to mention individuals) use their machines mostly for word processing and surfing the net - and thus they will have little use for this kind of service.
Tor
If IBM is stuffing ten billion dollars into this project, they must be expecting over ten billion dollars in revenue to be generated. But, what corporation needs "supercomputer-level resources" that doesn't already have access to some?
If IBM makes CPU time expensive, they might get their money back, but few people will pay the necessary cash, since it might be more cost-effective to buy a supercomputer or a clustering solution of some type. If IBM makes it cheap, many will come up with possible uses for it, but they can't make their initial investment back.
Seems like a lose-lose situation. Then again, one would hope the IBM folk know the scene better than I do.
...in an age were processors are dirt cheap anymore. I mean really, if I saw a p2 400 chip and a quarter lying side-by-side on a street corner, I'd pick up the quarter.
To win back that initial 10 BILLION [pinky finger to lips] investment? $1 per Ghz?
$.01 per Ghz?
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
It took the rest of the computing world YEARS to match the color & sound of that baby. What, you don't remember CGA and speaker music? Tisk.
Sure some tasks in graphic design and in the film industry need supercomputer level horsepower for short period of time, but most people don't need that sort of power ever. There are also security questions that ppl might have about putting their sensitive data on multiuser systems.
Eat at Joe's.
and home users (just *normal* people, k, not geeks) should be able to have no actual personal computer at home;
:)
Imagine a world where those that want nothing to do with maintaining their PC can run applications remotely on a supercomputer;
the 'office' suite is maintained for them
remotely, as is all the other PC infrastructure
(security, virus checking, updates etc).
And most importantly they don't get to BREAK anything.
A blissful world where IT support people don't have users ringing up and yelling
"MY PC IS BROKEN WORD WONT START I INSIST YOU DROP WHATEVER YOU ARE DOING AND COME AND FIX IT RIGHT THIS INSTANT! WAAAAHHHHHH *SOB*"
You know, the sort of things that drive desktop support people totally insane (unless they take inordinate amounts of recreational pharmaceuticals).
Om peace peace
Go IBM, go.
So long as those that *want* a PC can have one without paying IBM for my own CPU cycles...
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
This reminds me of how scientific super computers/clusters are leased out to various researchers for computing time. It works very well for that target audience, or so I am told. With a well formulated design and clever marketing IBM could find another audience for such "metered computing". I can't think of any other industry outside of the scientific community that would be looking for such a solution though. In the long run, wouldn't it be cheaper just to hire a consulting firm to build you a cluster?
...but, as the article points out, only for corporate/supercomputer types of situations.
After all, the PC revolution demonstrated that individual users want unrestricted computer usage on their own terms, and were/are willing to pay a fairly generous amount for it.
I only see this project working out as long as companies see it as cheaper than building their own solutions. Linux-based clusters can provide a fairly low-cost solution for a lot of high-end computing needs (like rendering tanks) -- that's what IBM will be competing with.
I think it'll boil down to how greedy IBM gets on pricing. If it's too pricey, companies with a fairly regular need for lots of computing power will deploy their own internal computing clusters -- which is ironic, considering that IBM will probably stay very interested in supplying such solutions. It sounds like they're just trying to play all sides of the game: Sell the big/pricey hardware, sell time on the big pricey hardware, sell the lower-cost alternatives -- or at least the contract to deploy and maintain them.
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
"Will this model revolutionize the way companies compute, or is this plan doomed to be another PCjr?"
yes. Doomed to be another PCjr. People want expensive goods that they can brag about. Plus, let's see you game on it. Personally, metered utilities are bad enough on their own without extending into my computer.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I just wanted to give a little tip on writing large numbers.
If you have a number like $10,000,000,000, it can become annoying to count the groupings of zeros and make sure you didn't miscount. That is why you can just write $10 billion.
Just because Brits call it a milliard doesn't mean we have to bend over backwards for them.
with the amount of raw computing power available for low prices (at least low to a large company), is this really necessary? More importantly, though it may have some use for a choice few businesses, the problem seems to arise in regaining those 10 billion dollars put into this project. even if this is a moderately sized success, it seems unlikely that a large profit would be made outside of merely regaining the investment.
"Hey brother Christian with your high and mighty errand / your actions speak so loud I can't hear a word you're saying"
Actually people are already doing this. I work for a Fortune 500 company that outsourced all of its data centers to IBM already. IBM charges them based on CPU and disk space available for use at any time. This will allow them to cut costs even more by only paying for what they actually use; there is no expense for idle-time. Yes this is a concept from the 60's but everything gets recylced. Another concept from the 60's is a fat server with dumb terminals. In the 80's we went to a PC on every desk and now because of networks and the internet we have gone back to a fat server and dumb terminals.
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See, at that time ubiquitous networking was not a way of life. Also, software engineering was not as mature as it is now WRT to virtual machines, encapsulation, OO design, etc.
Of course, all those technologies did exist then, but they can be counted on to be everywhere now. The reason mainframe timesharing gave way to PC's is because PC's could provide a more flexible and convenient sandbox to compute in, rather than the cumbersome interface of working with the mainframe in the company basement.
These days returning to the idea of computing power as a fluid resource is a good idea because the landscape has changed and the world might actually be better prepared to accept the tradeoffs since the tradeoffs are much less significant now.
Your PC no longer belongs to you. It belongs to the phone company...err I mean IBM
0xfeedface
don't ever let this happen. The car design scenario creeped me out. I work for an automotive supplier, and we ALREADY have to wait in line to use test equipment, testing chambers, etc. I can only imagine the local supercomputing hub monopolizing the speedy machine, creating more lines to wait in, and IBM bringing its supercomputer prices out of reach for anyone but their own subsidiaries to purchase. Could be a disaster, indeed.
hi, I like pancakes -.-- -.-- --..
The concept IBM is going for is to treat IT as another utility. Instead of some small company having to keep an expensive IT staff and maintain their own computers/network/storage, IBM says that it will do this for you. IBM will essentially replace the IT department and let some organization concentrate on running their own business.
The cost saving of such a model (if successful) are quite substancial and will save everyone money in the end.
I think IBM is on the right track with this and they are the only company really positioned to do so.
If this isn't an idea for a killer app, I don't know what is.
With IBM's continuing support of Linux in the commercial and high end server space, I have no doubt that this will be a GNU/Linux friendly project, if not composed entirely of GNU/Linux software.
And just imagine the possibilites for breaking the MS monopoly. I can just imagine companies with hundreds of cheap, dumb, never-needing-to-be-upgraded X terminals connected to this computing "utility" for all their office/CAD/research/calculation/accounting/etc needs.
Why not combine your computing "utility" bill with your software "utility" bill? IBM's supercomputers could always have the latest versions of Sun/Open/IBM/etc office suites. It would be the natural extension of the software subscription model.
This project is going to make MS quake in its boots .
Nowadays the need for computing are everywhere. For instance where I'm studying almost every research group has its own Linux cluster. The use of these hardware comes in burst--often it sits idle, but when it is needed, it turns out to be under-powered. Besides, the maintenance of this machine costs too much man-power and money. After a couple of years/projects, these machines go out-of-date anyhow. Of course any given lab could always negotiate the use of supercomputers at large research centers, but IMHO having the infrastructure in place will be very useful.
First IBM needs to show how this new approach can lower customers' costs. If they can do that, then maybe it will work. If not, it won't.
Likewise you can get a machine with an big ol batch of CPUs, most of them disabled. Over, say, the Christmas rush you call your salesperson and have the other CPUs turned on for a month. Again: Strange but the corporate customers seem to like it.
I doubt it'd affect Joe Average Desktop user all that much. Your average desktop has more processing power than he'll ever need and is already dirt cheap. It's only when you start talking machines worth millions of dollars that this sort of thing makes sense. The same people who go for this stuff pay out tens of thousands of dollars a month for support costs and they get some very good value for their money.
Many of you youngsters might not be all that hip to mainframe culture or mentality, but it's a pretty good deal and those machines are still amazingly fast. A lot of shops haven't been able to get rid of their big iron because PC clusters just couldn't deliver as promised. Our VM box back at school routinely had 5000 users on 13 years ago and that machine never even hiccupped.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The last 35 years development in computers were precisely to move away from the "metered service" model which made IBM's fortune.
On will recall that IBM's data-processing customers since the 1920's were charged by units of information stored/processed by the way of forcing customers to buy Hollerith (punch) cards solely from IBM, and run them in rented machines whose rental price was directly proportionnal to the throughtput of those (a card reader that processed 600 cards per minutes cost twice as much as one that processed 300, yet the only difference was the size of the pulley off the main motor - and you could upgrade by having an IBM tech that came and changed the pulley for a bigger one).
So is it that the ghost of Thomas Watson sr has made a comeback to IBM's board of directors????
With all the wasted CPU cycles gumming up the environment this had to happen. We only have so many CPU cycles and with the present administration sqandering them I'm glad to see IBM taking the lead as a big corporation in helping save the cycles! Finally all the donations to Greenpeace are paying off! It's my planet too! >
We had metered cpu usage at college. It was a constant, annoying nightmare. Though the "money" was supposedly "fake" to students, you had to beg the admin assistants in the CS department to get more when your account ran low. The administrators of the Computer Center claimed it was actual money charged to each department. The school also gave out free accounts to students with small money allocations in them which gamers borrowed and stole to play GalTrader on the VAX.
I thought it all went away until I started working for IBM. Every time you log out of the mainframe the computer told you how much money your session cost the company. That turned out to be real money that was charged to the department you worked for. We eventually reverted to using X Terminals connected to massive, rack-sized RS/6000 machines instead of the mainframes after that.
Kris
Kriston
If my history books and gathered information is correct, that was a business model used in early computers. A company would lease CPU time to users, generally because the end users couldn't afford the massive costs involved to purchasing and maintaining them.
Now, I'm relatively young (mid 20's), but I recall people not even a half generation older than I telling stories about getting in trouble for running up large bills on their school's timeshare account.
I could see where this might be useful, but only for a small handful of customers. There are not very many users of supercomputer's out there right now. I can't see that number increasing much just by servicing new customers who could benefit from a supercomputer but couldn't otherwise justify it for a short term project.
If they are dumping 10 billion dollars into this, they must think they are going to get at least that much out of it. I seriously doubt that they could do so, not without ridicously overpricing their service. For small time users who don't need supercomputer levels, there are much cheaper ways to go. (Buy your own gear, lease your gear, etc)
I work for a specialized outsourcing outfit that manages storage for large customers (internet datacenters primarily). I know how much of a pain in the ass it is to accomplish what we do now. I could just see the mess people would get into by getting into a timeshare system like this.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
Computing will be made into a utility like hydro and the closest most users will get to a computer as we know it will be a wall socket. This will happen because big business and government want it to happen, because like bank robbers to banks, they know that's where the money is. The only recourse will be to go off the grid. Like many farmers are now going off the hydro grid and turning to wind and solar power we will have to go off the grid perhaps forming co-ops, credit unions and other institutions to allow us to access the big business and government run net while not being subject to the strictures. Maybe an independent satellite grid?
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
"... and in other news today: the Pentagon admitted that secret information was accessed when IBM's mainframe was hacked by the Chinese. Additionally, it seems that the designs for General Motor's new hydrogen car were stolen."
So much for expanding the market.
When I worked at NASA Ames Research Center in 1996, we had a few Cray supercomputers with 16 CPUs each (a big deal back then), plus various other multi-CPU systems and clusters (AIX and SGI based. Bleech!) and we had hundreds of customers from all over the country that all used the system remotely for simulations. We kept detailed records of their CPU usage for billing purposes.
Is IBM going to figure out some way to re-invent this?
Stories of the past....
Keine eier
One of my first computers was an IBM PC JX (which I understand is similar to the PC JR). This was the first Personal Computer (ie. box with drives, monitor, keyboard) that I ever encountered - a big step up from the old cpu-under-keyboard micros. The 256K RAM was a big step up too.
It was made in 1980 AFAIK, but had a 3.5" diskdrive and a cordless keyboard (features which never came along in other computers for several years).
Why does the article talk about it as if it was a bad thing?
"Where can I sign up to get time on the PCjr cluster farm?"
So you want to sign onto the new and improved "peanut" cluster...with almonds? Carmel will be an extra charge item.
So how will corporate customers be convinced to trust sending their data to and processing their data on IBM's grid of computers?
But it'd be nice for running multiplayer gaming servers.
At one point of my life I woulda loved to get my hands on whatever that exec was smoking while writing this stuff.
I am the Barber of Seville.
Maybe this isn't timesharing we're talking about (though that was my first thought too), but rather the submission of batch job. Has anybody who has actually read the article want to shed some light on this ;)
Yes, yes, I know, "Why haven't you read the article!"
Surely this makes the same business sense as companies not owning property, but prefering to lease them from property companies.
Why have your money tied up in expensive capital assets (and thereby affecting your cash position) when you could in effect pay by use.
Its a similar business logic that persuades companies to outsource non core business processes (and you could be suprised at what companies consider non core - I heard Ford are considering outsourcing building cars).
Is that we continue to see companies like Microsoft and IBM looking to change their revenue model to subscription based services. It makes sense, just today I was talking to a friend about what parts I was planning to order to build his computer. And thinking about it, the average user can run most of their average software on a 1ghz intel or athlon board. Microsoft is having a problem getting people to continue upgrading simply because the lifespan of the software as-is is good enough for most. Naturally, the hardware demand will slow when software isn't written in such a way that it requires more horsepower. I think these companies see the writing on the wall. I'm just disappointed that instead of Revolutionizing they would rather rope consumers into some sort of model that doesn't require any extraordinary efforts on their part.
You notice that the crapulence that was the PCjr came out soon after the mighty IBM (who incidentally, had been fighting off the Fed's anti-trust suits for decades...) allied theirselves with a upstart company named MicroSoft. Coincidence?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Can you properly punctuate an interrogative sentence.
I already have about 1.7Ghz to much. I had a 233Mhz Pentium 1, it done everything I needed. I only upgraded for the shiny new box
Distributed Dot Net.
Seriously, with people like Google rolling distributed computing into the next version of the Google toolbar, and the success of the various @home projects, I can see a better business model based around using people's hardware that is already in existence -- no need for a 10 billion outlay.
After all, who would mind leaving their Athlon/P4 on overnight to crunch some numbers, perhaps for a rebate on their connection bill or a similar reward system? That money could buy an awful lot of idle LAN boxes... and funding schools etc. like that would be great publicity.
This reminds me of UNIX's parent, Multics, which had similar goals but never achieved widespread acceptance.
A CRAY supercomputer in 1980 has the equivilent processing power of a 500MHz processor. By the time IBM gets people to switch to this "pay for cycles" method computers will surpass it's ability in the cost/performance arena.
It's not always how fast you go, it's how efficiently you get there. I could fly on the shuttle from Kennedy Space Center to Edwards Space Center (assuming NASA would lighten up the travel for free restrictions on italians in oklahoma! lol) but as fast as the shuttle goes I could drive there faster (although not nearly as stylish).
There is nothing preventing IBM from doing this. What many of you newbies fail to realize is that IBM basically created the Internet (formerly DARPANet) back in 1954, which was originally intended as a backup communications system in case of a nuclear attack. Well kiddies, 90% of the hardware which comprises the internet (email and www included) is owned and operated by (you guessed it) by IBM.
Where does this leave us? With a specter bigger than Microsoft, bigger than Intel, or even the RIAA. All IBM has to do is replace the chips in these web servers with the new "metered" processors, and overnight, every time you log in to the web, time to pay up.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
No joke. New PPC CPU that is squarely targeted for the desktop + an explicit declaration that they believe the next generation of personal computing is upon us and that they intend to take the lead in this space + this announcement == IBM up to something _REALLY BIG_
Now I just need to get a solar array to power my array of older computers so I can sell back their CPU cycles to IBM and maybe, just maybe, earn enough to pay for the solar cells.
Kevin Fox
This is actually a very good point. Cup of tea ?
The article seems to imply that large industrial customers (eg. Ford, GM, DaimlerChrysler) will pay to "rent" the supercomputing time they need to do calculations on a brand-new model of car.
I greatly doubt that any company would allow such incredibly valuable data out the door to be operated upon by hardware under the physical control of anybody else!
There's likely a market for it somewhere, but it seems they'd be time ahead to develop and push more intelligent clustering solutions. Imagine how much could get done if all of the idle cycles on workplace boxen were put to full use...
No, this is _way_ more expensive than the PCJr was. $10billion? Sheesh... Lot of money. I wonder how they came to that figure? Why not 9 billion, or 11 billion?
At least the PCJr wasn't doomed to begin with -- the only way to make CPU time valuable is to limit the amount available. With Moores law and economies of scale (how long till we have an 8-way 5GHz CPU system? How much longer until we have the same with 10GHz?) I find it difficult to conceive of any way to beat it, other than absolute domination.
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
PCjr
This is exactly what computing needs in order to propel itself into the generation. Biological simulations require so much computational power that an efffective means of harvesting and paying for distributed computing is necessary.
Everyone's so incredibly focused on their quarterly/monthly/dayly/hourly earnings numbers that companies don't want to sink big bucks into big IT project right now. Give them a chance to rent something by the hour/MIP/whatever and even if they pay more over the long run it keeps the 'up front' expenditure down and doesn't hit this quarter's numbers...makes the numbers look better, keeps the investors happy, lets the execs sleep a little better at night. Plus if you rent MIPS for a month on some new super-duper project and realize it's a dud you can walk away without having invested too heavily.
I don't know what everyone is comlaining about. Take a look at the wonderful user-oriented, monopolistic services companies like the Phone and Cable companies currently provide (Qwest, Verizon, Cox, etc). This is a terrific model to emulate. And think of all the lovely intelligible Taxes the government could add to your monthly computing bill.
0xfeedface
If all it is is code for a price hike, yes, it will fail.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
You save money by outsourcing to IBM. But then you have other things to look at.
First you'll still need some sort of helpdesk staff. Internal or outsourced to IBM.
Second you're going to be spending more money on telecom circuits. Now you'll need enough bandwith out to the internet to support all of your "knowledge workers."
Third security. Who will own the data? How will the data be secured against competitors who might also be IBM's customers?
Fourth is backups. What is the liability if IBM can't restore a deleted file or email? What about redundancy and downtime? Who is responsible for lost revenue?
Fifth it won't save as much money as IBM is hyping. Every company has tons of data that is rarely used, but still sits on file servers taking up space. This model won't change this. You will still be paying for storage that rarely gets used.
It all boils down to what you need and how much it costs. If all I need is a few minutes of "super-computing" time a month, it may indeed be more cost-effective to use time share. Even there, one could learn from how cellular telephone service companies market their "time sharing" wireless service. Probably something like 500 minutes per month for $30 and $0.50 each additional minute.
On the other hand, if the computing time-share service is aimed at organizations that need lots of super-computing, I would guess that it will have to be significantly cheaper to "rent" than to "own". This type of model does work - but only if there is sufficient cost differential. What the desktop PC did was to wipe out the cost advantage of renting/time share for nearly all daily computational needs. The remaining market for "shared" computing is really quite small (and will be increasing small as desktop computing power increase). I wonder how long it will take IBM to recover the 10B investment.
wow, bad programming would _REALLY_ cost you!
there goes the wintendo TCO
. . . when you can make a free client available for download (____@home) and have it done for free?
track7.org has all kinds of interesting stuff!
There are some good reasons for selling CPU time as an on-demand service. I'm sure IBM knows what those reasons are and will use them to try and sell this concept.
But there are two, possibly three, very powerful forces working against them here.
First, computing power is very cheap these days. It's not precious. People have 2 GHz Pentium 4 processors sitting around waiting for their next keystroke in Word and they don't feel guilty about wasting CPU cycles.
Second, the price keeps dropping at about a 40% annual rate. That same cheap PC waiting for the next keystroke would have been worth tens of millions of dollars to a scientific establishment in 1974. Not now. With a market where the supply of computing power is constantly increasing, it will be very difficult to peg any kind of price that people can use to make buying decisions, because those decisions will look foolish a year from now when someone asks why they didn't just buy a couple more PCs, or even a rack of PCs to do the task.
Third, the rented computing power needs to be connected very well with the data it will be processing or producing. If the rented machine is on the customer's site next to his SAN warehouse, then everything's fine and this may not be a real problem. But if the big machine is in Fishkill and the customer's 10 TB of data are sitting in a weird database inside a firewall connected via T1 to the Internet, then there may be a problem.
If I were IBM, I'd look into ways of increasing demand for computing power. Protein folding simulations for new pharmaceuticals is one way, financial scenario analyses is another, and database mining is yet another. They have to make customers want to buy extra computing power because they can easily see a business need for doing so.
The other thing is they need to increase demand for the ultra high reliability mainframes. For some of those computing needs, a rack o cheap PCs is going to be a much more economical choice for their customers. However, there are some applications, like VoIP telephony, video streaming, or credit card approvals, where people would get upset by downtime.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Has the business world been clamoring for metered computing? I don't think so.
A few years ago, everyone was touting how useful flat-rate pricing was. Of course, that was also when the consumer was in the driver's seat. Now that the picture is changing, there seems to be a shift back towards metered pricing. Of course, the seller benefits more with metering than the consumer, and this may be a sign that the sellers are beginning to get an upper hand again.
Metering makes sense on resources that are limited. With an ever-increasing pool of compute power available, how would metering be beneficial to the customer? Will the per-cycle charges be constantly reduced as new technology is added to the fold?
...pay me the 10 bil and I'll e-mail you a link to /. There'll you'll find what will happen with you're new strategy before it's even implemented.
It's pitched at the corporate market. They're really just talking about outsourcing.
Why buy hardware, software, personnel, etc., when you can hire us (IBM) to do it for you. Rather than a set contract, we'll just bill you as you go along.
How different really is a browser-based client-server application from a mainframe-3270 terminal app?
- Despite popular opinion, I am not perfect.
The initiative is expected to cost $1.86e+93 Kabillion dollars.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
I think many people are missing the point. This is not a return to Mainframe-style time-sharing (although the technical descriptions and business model might seem that way).
What IBM is proposing is that companies should not have to deal with running an IT department, when all they want to run is their business. They can simply pay for CPU cycles just as they pay for electricity, and their applications will simply use those cycles to perform their desired computation/storage.
Think about this: No more dealing with hardware. No more huge IT staff. No more complex budgeting for IT. No more upgrade nightmares.
Also, companies with as weak IT department will now be confident that the IBM (or whoever) datacenter folks will handle all the security concerns for their application (user access, encryption, authentication, DoS, hackers, etc). Likewise, they will feel confident that the datacenter folks will mirror and backup their data offsite in the event of a catastrophe, something only large companies today can afford to do.
Once companies realize the benefits of this, not only will they rent CPU cycles, they might even decide to rent applications as well. Today the Applications Service Providers model has not taken off due to a lack to a killer app. I think Grid Computing is that killer app.
The only way this will be adopted by consumers is if it is cheaper to rent processing eq than it would've been to buy it. The only way that it good for IBM is if it's cheaper to build than it is to rent.
i.e.
|-New Model Profit-|
Cost to Buy > Cost to Rent > Cost to Build
|----------Old Model Profit----|
The only advantage is if IBM limits the "peak" processing power of the system, but then businesses will lose the immediacy of available processing power and we'll probably end up with ridiculous price scales like we see in the peak/off-peak cell phone plans.
Dupe posts are
"For instance where I'm studying almost every research group has its own Linux cluster. The use of these hardware comes in burst--often it sits idle, but when it is needed, it turns out to be under-powered. "
That's were distributed networking comes in. I doubt all those clusters busy or idle cycles coincide. One cluster isn't enough for a task, borrow someones idle one. Much cheaper than borrowing time off a mainframe. And keeps everything inhouse, which is one of the reasons PC's were invented.
What IBM has said is that it hasn't got anything new to report but that its still here. If you look at their figures $10Bn works out at 3.5bm for the consultancy firm they purchased, a few billion for Grid computing, and I guess a couple of billion for linux. With a bit of spare change for research.
Why are they doing this? My guess is that CFO's keep complaining about the cost of computing resources. A multinational with 10,000 desktops still has to ask for clusters and supercomputers for serious work while TFlops of processing are sitting idle on the secretarys desktops. Hard Disks, which used to be able to just about hold the OS, Office suite and files now have 10's of GBs of wasted storage.
If you're serious about using computers you want to use resources efficently. And from IBM's perspective so how does this idea sound ...
IBM sells computers to a firm, it then sells the software to turn all their hard disks into a P2P file storage system so that you never lose that important document ever again. Instead of a new cluster - set all the desktops to process data overnight as a massivly distributed system. (using IBM software), installed by IBM engineers under the direction of their new consultants. And of course the only real option for this is Linux.
A single, nice, neat package. A single point of contact and massive economies of scale. Now assume that their contract allows them to use/sell spare cycles and their revenue stream suddenly improves a lot.
eventually, according to Gate's Law, you'll need a Dual 3Ghz with thousands of megs in RAM just to run a word processor.
One online magazine did all that? Now I know who to blame!
In any case, I'm not sure how far this return-to-the-mainframe idea will take us; we've had the technological framework for doing this for years -- think RPC, OpenStep's Distributed Objects, Sun's GRID engine -- but where's the real value to the department's bottom line?
I spent a number of years working on an extremely computationally-intense business process for the not-so-late, not-so-lamented WorldCom. For about half of that time, I was running the systems architecture and administration group, so performance management was a huge concern. We chewed up a lot of user time, but we were primarily hampered at every layer of the process by I/O (disk and network) and memory constraints. The same has been true of the accounting and provisioning systems I've worked with since then: the enterprise-level bottlenecks these days are things that can't be purchased on demand.
I'm sure there's a market for these kinds of services -- medical imaging, for example, though the network costs would be high -- but something to bet the Big Blue (computing) Farm on? I just don't see it. *shrug*
"Freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more."
A lot of people here are pooh-poohing this as "time-share" computing which was around back in the day saying we've moved away from that concept. I think it could certainly be a viable option for companies that are wanting more computing power, but also looking to cut costs.
Also, consider that the companies making use of this would never have to upgrade their own clusters. I constantly see newer clusters being planned by companies and governmental agencies. It's always more processors, more MHz per processor and more nodes per cluster. Why not offload all of this onto a company (IBM in this case) who can put the resources (both in hardware and personnel intimately familiar with that hardware) necessary to maintain and grow ever larger, more powerful clusters.
IMHO, it seems like a great idea. It will give far more companies access to "super-computers" than ever before and at a significant savings.
It seems that once again IBM is being a very forward-thinking company and will probably end up make a pile of cash because of a little foresight and some guts to act on it.
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
This is disturbingly similar to the doomed effort of Enron to make Internet Bandwidth a commodity. http://thewhir.com/king/enron.cfm This effort is considered by some to be the "beginning of the end" for Enron For the IBM effort to work it must overcome the hurdles that tripped Enron. 1. Creating a market. In order to make this work, IBM must change the way that corporations think about computing power. Only after this change in thinking will a "computing" market appear. 2. Temptation to Over invest Enron invested far more than they got out of bandwidth trading. Essentially they bet the farm before the results of the "creating market" were in. IBM should make sure that this is going to work by investing in increments.
So let me get this straight. IBM wants us to send them our code so they can compile it on their super computers? Then they can submit my code to the opensource project for me and take credit for my work so they can get there stats higher so they can win the coding challenge?
Well hold on I will go ask Microsoft Palladium if you are on my list of trusted compilers.
With the millions of PCs sitting around with "Idle" as the busiest process, imagine getting a penny or so per CPU second, selling CPU time on the open market to the
Now, you have a value for CPU time on the open market. You should be able to
For a reference of a future society that uses this, see Greg Egan's "Distress" and perhaps "Permutation City"
Design for Use, not Construction!
Lets get away from a world were nobody knows what to do with the computing power that is almost freely available. Let's move into the wonderful world of GRID COMPUTING, where we can con people into paying for something they really don't understand. GRID COMPUTING, the marketing way of saying that Beowulf is a book - now give me the money.
1. Build a giant supercomputing infrastructure. 2. ? 3. ? 4. Profit! I know, I know...
Also, and I believe this was addressed in the article, look at all those failed startups that were left with expensive hardware and koosh balls. With a way to rent time on a supercomputer, certain kinds of startups become a much more economical possibility.
By way of comparison, I once visited a company that does high-end CG for movies, videos, and commercials. They showed me their render-farm, which they said they supplemented by renting computers to lighten their load at busy times.
For a company like that one, IBM's plan would further eliminate the need to rent the space to stick those computers, the cost of running an overpowered AC system at less than full-power (when they don't have so many machines going,) the cost to order, ship, hook up, and maintain the machines.
If IBM's system were available and I were to start a CG house, I would get some smart programmers, animators, etc. and some modest workstations, but rent time as needed from IBM for creating finished product. (Just a toy example, if you're ripping my "business plan" apart, you've missed the point.)
Finally, many industries have a tendency towards consolidation. Larger and larger companies could be a good market for systems like this one, simply due to their size. Also, larger companies could be a good market for IBM because they make bigger moves when they enter new markets. (Look at IBM itself, committing $10 billion to this project.)
I'm sure this computation as a utility makes alot of sense to the old school IBM shareholders (such as myself) who draw analogies from the utilities of the world (kW/hr ~= MIPS/year) such as the power or telephone company. "Sweetheart, did we pay the computation bill this month?"
It will take one solid, free, open-source, distributed computing application to turn this into another PCjr, and turn the hurt on this strategy the way Linux is putting the hurt on Windows' marketshare.
Is there a distributed client that would simulate a gigantic supercomputer? I mean one that permits anything to run on this platform? I mean for FREE :) imagine the potential of it. Our own free opensource GRID.
This will allow them to tax all the PS3 owners!!! Boy, won't Johnnies mom be surprised to see her credit card bill the month after she gives Johnny a PS3 for his birthday! You never knew watching a flashy boot logo could cost so much, did you?
I would much rather see distributed computing being further worked on. It just makes more sense.
1Gbit network with the systems sharing storage (distributed *redundant* RAID perhaps?) and CPU resources (among others) would be very nice.
It would be nice to be able to do this and share Sun, Linux, BSD, OSX, whatever. Realistically though I'm willing to be Apple brings this concept to market first...as usual.
I love this idea. For AI issues that only need a burst of CPU time in a lot this would be a god send to say, counter-strike developers. They could write a really complex AI to auto-generate waypoints for bot behaviors but would only have to pop say, $50 for a thousand cpu hours worth of computing time. For game developers that want AI waypoint generation this could be a great tool to offload cpu calculation that only need to be done once in a while (i.e. Everquest adds a new, complex zone. They have a waypoint script that runs but normally takes 4 days to run. They pop a quick $200 bucks and kick out the results in an hour. Saving time and allowing better generation by being able to do massive complex tasks quickly.) Or what about a VERY complex random map generator that simulates thousands of variables down to what was for dinner? You can spend more time developing rich complex algorithms and you can choose to take 3 weeks to generate the map at home, but if your a comerical application (or a well funded server) you can have the the super computer spit a unique map out (i.e. for every X dollars dontated through paypal we'll generate a new custom map.) I can see it now.... drool...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Let's see, at [pulls # out of ass] 10 cents a minute, that's 190,000 compute-years just to break even! OK, so maybe they will be able to charge more but they must be planning on a pretty sizable market. Or recoup rendering Toy Story sequels.
FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec
If they came out with a toolbar for other browsers they could *really* have coverage.
The PCjr was state of the art in 1983 when it came out. And 16 colors was a hell of a lot more than most computers could do back then. The wireless keyboard was great for sitting back from the computer and typing away (in 40 column mode).
I have fond memories of sitting back from my souped up PCjr 640k of ram (soldered in), and TWO low density 360k floppies and telneting into school over a 1200 baud modem.
State of the art, man!
- Keith
Besides, 640K should be enough for anybody, right?
...Is this the Future of PC Gaming?
Campers pay by the minute!
#2 has FINALLY been solved!
... *cough cough* Yes Bueller? Sell the usage of said supercomputers on a metered rate? Congratulations, A+ for you!
(1) Create supercomputers that get increasingly powerful and versatile, advanced to the point that they could defeat one out of dozens of chess champions.
(2)
(3) Profit!
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
this show's up in greg egan's permutation city (too lazy to link). it becomes a metered service and a commodity, so when the big boys (i.e. governments or consortiums thereof) need time, they just bid it up. kinda interesting idea.
Imagine renting some time and setting up a multiplayer game on Medal of Honor and recreating D-day with thousands of players on one of their supercomputers. That might be fun.
Vote for Pedro
Either that or Carl Sagan!
Coin dollars are still way better than the paper alternative just for sheer efficency and resources saved. It'll be an easier way to pay for the comp cycles too, even though it is an inane idea.
(Sponsored by cheeseSource for President 2012)
This is exactly what one of the startup companies in Austin was trying to do. It's major source of funding was VC from Enron
okay.. who else needs a supercomputer? And don't say chess guys... IBM already does their computers.
Seriously.. where's the market for "part time" supercomputing? Who needs to simulate to the interaction of atoms on tuesday, but not on wednesday? I may be missing something.. so while i'm sounding snotty... i really am wondering who "part time supercomputer users" are. Can anyone enlighten me?
All the users i can think of also spend a bunch of their time hacking the setup of their systems as well.. the last thing they will want is to lose all that mindshare - because these guys are uber-deep into the understanding of the problems AND the MP architectures needed to support the specific problems.. OR they'll spend their time trying to explain their problems to the IBM guys.
Help me... who does IBM think the users of this power are going to be?
Okay.. the protein folding guys.... that's 1....
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
this would sure as hell put an end to distributed computing.
unless someone had the cash to cover for them. or they would be allowed for free (like an 800 number).
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
Oh lord, we did this twenty years ago when we did batch jobs. I'd always have a dollar amount at the end of a run. When the hell was this guy born?
Whoo hoo! Now people who know that O(n^2) is worse than O(n log2 n) (and know how to make a function that will run in that) will be able to find better paying jobs. Finally my B.S. degree will pay off!
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
the dollar with her face on it was withdrawn and replaced with the gold one, * which doesn't have her face on it.*
Sheesh. Pay attention. Don't you even watch late night cable?
Can you say: Sack-ah-jew-ee-ah?
I knew you could.
They're very useful too, considering that a dollar is what a quarter was . . . several months ago.
KFG
KFG
Well, this is going to lead to a few possible outcomes:
1.) The first outcome is one in which IBM wastes $10 billion and becomes the laughingstock of the industry. This seems to be the most likely outcome because using Linux and Beowulf, anyone can assemble their own supercomputer for a small amount of money.
2.) People actually buy into this shit and start using IBM's model for processing. People obviously don't want to waste any processor operations -- similar to gas consumption in cars -- so there's an ongoing race to create efficient software (and it's about fucking time). Of course, this leads to a situation where as software becomes more and more efficient, it requires less and less processing power, meaning it can run on smaller systems, meaning IBM will have a bunch of supercomputers sitting around doing nothing because they've evolved themselves into obsolescence.
Did this CEO work for Microsoft at any point? This whole "strategy" (I'm reluctant to apply that word to an idea as bad as this) reeks of something that would come out of Redmond. Have they learned nothing during their embracing of Linux? Do they really think that the end user wants to pay on a per-usage fee? The power of the computer is that all I pay for is a connection and electricity...given a choice where I have that, or a system which also requires me to pay for processing time, and I know which one I'll go with, every time.
You can't simply add a cost like this to the cost-of-ownership of a product with no significant improvement in overall cost or performance and expect it to be widely adopted.
And here all this time, I thought it was Microsoft that played the "let's throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" game of product development.
Time to sell my IBM stock. They just jumped the shark.
blog |
Ok, now imagine a beowulf cluster of timeshared supercomputers.....
- "That's just the kind of fuzzy-headed liberal thinking that leads to being eaten."
This could lead to companies and individuals selling excess processing power as a commodity.
Imagine something like a client that user X starts to put his processing power on the exchange with a price for use for X minutes. A buyer, Y, looking to do some intense number crunching for a certain amount of time buys the time from X, as well as other users, to get the job done.
Now, imagine building a Beowulf cluster and selling processing time on that!
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
as someone who has talked to IBM and other companies about leased/on-demand computing resources, this would have to be a very widely adopted strategy for it to work.
basically, everyone that I've dealt w/ that knows the technology understands the turnover rate on technology, esp. PCs, makes it hard for a single company to implement a cycle/hour/etc. based situation and make money. if you just lease cycles ( not the actual computers ), you end up w/ machines that are obselete in 3-5 years : make sure that you're charging enough that you end up making as much or more than you would have just selling the damn things. a lot of people don't look at the amount of power and A/C it takes to run a computer room, which is one of the main costs, and needs to be figured into the model as well.
now, this has a lot of interesting potential as more than a single-vendor based market. if I ( or my company ) could lease cycles off my/our machines, hell yes I would. but on 1 condition : the software that handles ops would have to be open-source. there's no way in hell that i would let some piece of crap, no-security proprietary code run on my box, and i'm reasonably sure that most companies feel that way as well, though they would be reassured by company promises, I'm not.
of course, this might be like IBM's linux initiative : they spent %90 of the pledged money telling everyone that they were spending X amount of money, or at least that's the running joke among my colleagues.
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
Yeah. Instead, all the blame is set on a faceless, nameless, potentially witless 'technician' that you may or may not be able to get in touch with via telephone if something goes wrong. Meanwhile, your valuable corporate data resides on systems that you don't own, and that can be taken away from you at a moment's notice.
And the potential for billing extortion is high. Contesting that too-large bill? Expect service to be shut off while the courts deal with it. Oops, there goes your business.
No security, no control, no confidence. No thanks.
... it was called multics.
Let's say IBM is able to set up a way to do what they propose, here's some basic utility concepts I'm curious how they will adddress:
1. Transferring product from generator (IBM supercomputer) to location. If you've just used 1 month of supercomputer time to model DNA folding, how will IBM transfer that data back to you? What if the computations and use are faster than the transmission rate? [Modem vs. DSL vs. T1 line]
2. Dependency - you rely up on natural gas and electricity to be there, and yes they go down, but can they guarentee their utility won't have worse problems - especially if its Windows run and goes down once a week, cutting into your bought utility time.
3. Regulation. Most utilities are regulated, and those that were deregulated have not always worked out for the consumer. Let's say company A gets rid of its expensive infrastructure for computing resources and uses IBM's utility. What if IBM becomes the only utility and charges way more than it should - there's no competition so Company A can't shop around. Along this same vien, if Company A is smart enough, they'll never enter into a utility agreement with IBM if they can generate their own computing cycles and be sure that they'll always be there, versus putting all their eggs in one basket.
IBM's idea may have merit, but anytime someone throws out the idea of a new Utility, that suggests that the resource they're selling is mainstream and essential, and therefore, is treated as a commodity. Those commodities are regulated and made reliable so that they never go down. I can't see supercomputing cycles as being something that is commodity, or for that matter, something I (or any company) needs to buy on a metered basis.
-When going for broke, go for Ithaca!
"The concepts of grid computing are not entirely new or unique to IBM. Hewlett-Packard Co. is pursuing similar ideas, for example." The original submission asked if this would "revolutionize" computing. I doubt it. This is one large company trying to react to another large company. For a company who outsources IT, this might be desirable. I don't think this would be good as a home computing model. However, as someone once noted "There's a sucker born every minute."
"Give a woman two glasses of wine and some pad thai, and they'll agree to just about anything." the Sports Guy
of course, if you wanted to pad your bill you could just run a few fractal programs overnight to crank up the CPU time.
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
I agree; we won't see the revival of timesharing anytime soon.
The PC revolution was based on the desire to get replace dumb terminals with something that could do color graphics, fancy fonts, and WYSIWYG word processing. This evolved into a more user-friendly interface for data manipulation.
For data-intensive applications, timeshare computing was economical, and it worked over low speed connections. Back in the 80's, it didn't take much data to qualify as "data intensive", either. I seem to remember something about a 32MB hard disk limit, for those PC users lucky enough to have hard drives. In general, data was never shared with anyone unless a mainframe was involved. File servers eventually brought data sharing to the PC, but even then, record locking was a joke compared to mainframe capabilities. You could run quite a few dumb terminals over a 9600 bps line, but that is inadequate for even one web surfer today.
OK, what has changed? Is there some new generation of CPU-intensive applications that requires far more CPU power than desktop computers have? I think this is yet another case of a solution in search of a problem. The NetPC was supposed to run apps without the need for a hard disk. The concept died when people discovered that hard disks were cheap and broadband Internet was not living up to the advertising claims. Along the same lines, who needs supercomputer resources when none of our applications are really CPU-bound in the first place? Aside from specialized stuff like ray tracing, animation, and possibly busting DRM algorithms, I don't know how timesharing would become a mainstream product.
...instead of sitting around surfing the 'net on company time, people will sit around and do ray-tracing on company time?
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
The problem, it seems to me, is that CPU's are so darn cheap now. Barring SETI@Home and such, when was the last time that the processor in your desktop/notebook/PDA needed more power, and would have benefitted from a connection to additional computing, or even supercomputing, power elsewhere?
Let's take it to an extreme. Suppose you have access to two computers, both with equivalent Internet access:
- A 1.3GHz machine with 128MB of RAM and a gigabit connection to your own private network of Cray 2K3's across town;
- A 2.6GHz machine with 512MB of RAM and no outside resources.
Which is going to do the kind of work you do faster? Seems to me that it will always be cheaper and more effective to add processing power to the machine that you have, rather than add connections to machines that you don't.Of course, this only applies to CPU power, not to information. If IBM applied these concepts to some sort of hyper-efficient all-inclusive datamining resource (think Snow Crash's Central Intelligence Corporation), I think they could make the Web as we know it look like a used comic-book stand. Just give me a Quad-Clawhammer PC with 4GB of RAM, a TB of RAID, and a VDSL connection to IBM Global DataMine, and I'll gladly take out a second mortgage.
Cause then they'd have to call it SkyNet. And as we all know,
SkyNet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14am Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
Sarah Connor: And, SkyNet fights back.
Seems like there would be limited demand for this product offering. Not may companies are hard up for computing resources... or network resources for that matter. They would probably be better off re-introducing the "turbo" button on their PCs and charge you for the right to push the button.
I've always believed that most of the software run on the big iron was problem-specific and machine specific. IBM must be planning to provide some custom programming to make this fly, and I'm guessing that's an important part of the profit plan.
See what I've been reading.
Punch card for personal id?
Maybe those guys at IBM is so inovative, that they will bring back core memory.
How could the parent post possibly be considered a troll?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Will this model revolutionize the way companies compute, or is this plan doomed to be another PCjr?
Only if it's cheaper, duh.
What is it about this industry that people have to reinvent old ideas that did not work when they were brought out originally? The concept of paying for what you use is not a new idea.
Heck, it is HOW THE INDUSTRY BEGAN. Colleges used to pay to use the computer, and you had to schedule time and code by entering in the values and then execute the program. If you were lucky, you could use this nifty device called a "Punch Card"
None of this is NEW. It is all just a rehash of ways to make money when the only money to be made is with old ideas. Lets start charging people for time again...that will boost our revenue!
It sucked then...so it will suck now....
You keep going until you die..."Me".
ASPs were never popular. Why? Companies don't feel comfortable with "all your data belong to us". Now give us more money or else...
As a tech, every outsourced service I've ever used has been less reliable than in house solutions. So, with the suits knowing this, why would they trust IBM? So now, instead of a down email server, slow network connection, or crashing desktops we will have the boss sending everyone home for the rest of the day.
I think IBM's management has looked at the tiny IT budgets in the marketplace and decided, "its us against the IT employees". Either they find a way to get rid of us to free up $$ for equipment or they don't sell equipment. This strategy is the same thing as the "autonomous computing" annoucement from a few weeks ago. Reduce labor expenses and buy from us!
> They can simply pay for CPU cycles just as they pay for electricity
Oh, so they don't need CPU cycles to connect to those rented cycles? They submit data and receive results by US Postal Service? Given that the equipment on customer premises is usually powerful enough for most typical processing required by your generic ACME anyway, what extra cycles exactly do they need? Today's company needs lots of STORAGE and NETWORK BANDWIDTH to store and transmit endless Outlook memos with large attachments, their processing demands are usually more than adequately met. And your typical ACME will be far too distrustful to let some faceless third party store those Outlook messages for them. Never mind that a big fat external WAN pipe to that third party is a lot more expensive than a big fat internal LAN pipe.
"Punch cards to revolutionize data storage industry"
IBM have for the past 2 years iirc selling at least there rs6000/p-series high end HA and SP kit with extra processors already installed but not enabled. Why when the customer might not purchase them. Well its simple really - it's actually cheaper for IBM. Given that blank processor cards would have to be installed into the CPU expansion slots they avoid the extra production costs of producing blanks. They also cut down on support as in the case of a failing processor there redundant spares kick in. This in itself helps to sell kit, save engineer callouts and generally gives the customer automated support regarding CPU failure. The cost of the actually CPU's whilst expensive is hardly going to mount up to a huge loss to IBM when you offset the plus points such a policy gives them. Let's not forget the potential/eventual sale of extra processors; or seasonal accounts run leasing of CPU's. I'm sure even Intel see this as a potential selling point of there hyperthreading in that nearly 50% of the CPU can fail and yet still run. Whilst they already do this what is new is that there proposing a more granular scale of costs. Which given lessons learned in the telecoms market and still being learned by fixed cost broadband providers would seem the more logical business model to adapt. Only problem is that the customer has had a taste of fixed cost models for so long that you just have to look at the struggle being had by the software industry in there hampered lust to also adopt this. Strangely enough the only players that have the damnedest chance of providing such a model to the customer in a way that they except is the mobile telecoms providers. Now if they play there cards right - well they could be the service portal providers for the other industries. Remember billing can be expensive also. This brings us back to the current model of batch/block jumps on demand. Still - a fairly sane move by the new chap at the top. Lets hope they don't go thru all there old patents - I swear IBM owns more IP than I'm allowed to even think about without violating copyrights somehow :-)
I used to work at a company that either owned or leased their own supercomputer for testing whatever it was they tested. I am guessing that unless this thing was used everyday, leasing shared time on a supercomputer as opposed to purchasing one would give a better return on investment assuming that the leased computer always had the latest technology, thus eliminating upgrade and maintenance costs. Perhaps IBM is looking for this type of a market as opposed to a company looking to hook up 200 terminals to run word processing and spread sheet programs.
Greed, pure and simple. From what I understand only ATMs in the US charge ATM fees. Those fees are also applied ONLY to US Cardholders of US Banks.
It is one of the biggest rackets ever created. I understand that the banks in Europe considered such a thing and the people over there rebelled at the thought of having to pay for a service that is normally provided for "free" (Albiet only during "Banker's" hours.)
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
No doubt some people will make an analogy with the mainframe timesharing computing style from '60 and '70s. This is not quite the same, the critical difference being that the computing resources will "shift" from company to company. It much more closely resembles the Sun's mantra "The Network Is The Computer".
For me, it looks like a cluster where nodes are automagically added and removed depening upon the demand for computing power.
~velco
with a pre-determined rate, IBM would have to build a lot of capacity to satisfy the peak demand times, but then they would have all that power sitting around unused when demand dies down. people who choose to use cpu cycles during off hours will end up subsidizing the peak demand users.
if IBM charged based on current demand, they wouldn't have to build up as much capacity because people would smooth out their usage to take advantage of cheaper prices during odd hours. before you submit a job, you could check and see what the current rates are, and also look at historic rates to try and predict a cheaper time to run your job.
sounds a lot like the arguments for running electricity markets...
I'm sure IBM will love coding error's. Recursive loop - that will do nicely Sir.
I wonder if they will let you run distributed clients on your computer that donate your cpu time to the pool and then you get check cut once a year or so.
I also think it would be cool if someone made an opensource project that let me donate my cpu time w/o having to worry about what project it was going to at any one point in time. That way when one contest stops I don't loose time switching to another.
Oh you young, supple and stupid punk.
You should care, apathy does not wear well on you, i'm afraid.
From reading all of the posts so far to this main topic I can tell you one thing: The vast majority of /. readers are NOT the target of "utility" computing. You aren't going to pry my linux box from my cold dead fingers and tell me I have to pay some IBM Global Service tech to do something I love doing myself... You will however convince a whole lot of companies out there who only need a $20 million mainframe during Christmas rush to sign up... Its like treating your mainframe like your electric bill, your payments are only nose-bleed high when you crank up the air conditioning, you don't have to pay to run the air conditioner when its -30 F. I think if IBM figures out the privacy problems associated with this it will work well for corporate users.
2010, AD. You buy a brand new computer from Dell. You walk to your uni-display device, and enter the information from Dell. You can now access your new "computer", which is really part of some huge super computer. Although the initial price (storage, etc) is low, you pay for cpu time AND bandwidth, which easily will exceed the original cost of a "legacy" computer.
I realize that's not exactly what the article is saying, but the possibility scares me.
The PCjr had a wireless keyboard! Maybe the first ever. It was infra red so you had to keep line of sight and not go too far (6 or 7") but it was wireless.
Dont mess with the PCjr!
just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand!
The revolution will be in revenue.
Currently IBM big customers buy a new machine every four years or so, they pay a yearly maintenance bill. IBM has trouble predicting it's revenue quarter to quarter, in a downturn everyone stops capital expenditure and IBM mainframe sales plummet.
Under this model everyone should pay less but they'll pay every month like clockwork.
Computer Associates has a similar scheme for software. You rent your software on a monthly basis.
On a technical level I'm all for it. I have a suite in my current site that is run yearly and takes for ever. Currently IBM has a big box sitting here and we just sip from it, until year end when we max it out for like two weeks. Let me rent time on a huge box and I'll be happy. Gurantee my data and response time and I'll be ecstatic.
Given the model they are proposing - would it not be fair for you to demand refunds on any code that is faulty that they supply. So if I could pay per yearly period for every CPU unit used which is not effected by a PTF or patch/fix mandated for support complience or support then I'd have a couple at home - hell make it 2. Would be handy for the odd lan party I suppose :D.
Any chance they would sell me one of those sexy flat screen monitors that they do - 22" with stupid resolutions. I'd pay per pixel per view - yeah :D.
It could work if they had the right implementation. I run a lot of MATLAB simulations that require a day or so of compute time and lots and lots of disk space. Would I pay for just the compute time? Disk space too? What about installing MATLAB? Do I get my own Virtual Machine?
They can either do a kick ass job, or they can screw it up and it'll go down the tubes. In the end all that matters is everyone gets their jobs done with less money had they not done the processing locally.
Bad news: the rates charged per byte/cycle/whatever ought to drop by 50% every generation (12-18 months these days).
More bad news: typical supercomputer code is usually bummed (at least a little) for the particular hardware it runs on, to get the last factor of two or so for performance. If you rent crunchons, can you afford to rent generic crunchons and give up that last bit of optimization?
Good news: if you can get around the bad news above, this could turn supercomputing into a lease-vs-buy situation, and when the computer you buy essentially depreciates 50% every generation, leasing might be a win.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
From what I recall, Enron sold electricity and got in trouble for cooking the books. That said, the electricity itself remains a *physical* commodity, and it is measured in real world physical units. A kilowatt of electricity is just as real as a gallon of gasoline.
Computing power can also be measured and sold in a similar way. That said, I'm not sure if I would like to have IBM be my CPU-cycle utility. I prefer to generate my own CPU-cycles using good old fashioned electricity (formerly sold by Enron) and silicon from several sources (Intel, nVidia, et al)
I think this is a great idea except it should be targetted at small companies that don't have supercomputing resources instead of large companies that already have these. I know when I worked at GM, they would send models to analyse on the big iron from remote engineering offices. Of course they'd wait a week on the queue and then the code would crash while loading (murphy's law is great isn't it).
-?-
Well, sure, the Frinkiac-7 looks impressive [to student] Don't touch it! [back to class] But I predict that within 100 years computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings in Europe will own them.
--Prof. Frink
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
Your message implies that this will be IBM's one and only method for providing service. It won't. You'll still be able to have a dedicated farm running your stuff if you want.
And how exactly can you compare this distributed approach to distributed.net? Makes no sense. Are you trolling?
Blar.
This isn't actually as big a shock as it appears, at least not if you've been following grid computing. IBM has already invested heavily in grid services and software. That's what this is aimed at.
They've been known to make this sort of heavy financial commitment to important technologies before (like Linux), so I expect this to be more of the same. In particular, it's good because it means they'll be in the Grid business for quite a while. Also, grids are hard to get right if you're designing them yourself, so having IBM do it for you will probably work out to being a substantial savings, both in time and money.
Check out my eclectic infosec blog at InfoSecPotpou
Just take this as evidence of another guy at the head of a company who is completely out of touch with his business, and move along. Normally the moronic ideas like this get canned before the big guy opens his mouth. Either this one slipped through or IBM have lost the cluster of technically savvy peons who usually vet the pronouncements of the senior execs. What a frikin' moron, sell your IBM stock.
Mr. Uradu,
Allow me to say that you (and the other person that replied) seem to be a bit confused about two things:
1. There is no "faceless" technician at the other end. What IBM is trying to do is exactly the opposite of that. They want to put tons of resources behind their Grid Computing initative so that companies have good reasons to move to that environment (i.e.: less downtime, more secure data, better performance, etc). It is to IBM's best interest to provide the highest quality service possible, or else nobody will join in or everyone will drop out after their first year (and remember that this is a per-ussage service, so the happier the customers are, the better for IBM).
2. What consumes most of the bandwidth in an internal company network is actually "raw" data. This meaning, database calls, method calls, etc. However once you outsource your IT department, you'll simply use your applications (preferably) using a web browser. This means that the only bandwidth being used by your company will be to display web pages. All the heavy work will be done at the datacenter backend. As for memos and attachments, those are things that will depend on the situation of each company. Some might simply opt to deal with those directly in their intranets, others will outsource it.
Likewise you can get a machine with an big ol batch of CPUs, most of them disabled. Over, say, the Christmas rush you call your salesperson and have the other CPUs turned on for a month. Again: Strange but the corporate customers seem to like it.
CPUs cost real money up front to make, ship, install, etc. If they send me 20, I only use 5, how do the other 15 get paid for?
The only way I can think of is grossly overcharging me for the 5 I do use, or REALLY overcharging me for on-demand capacity.
(*nix bigots and such note: Yes, I know, your defined user space on foobox is restricted unless you've chmod'ed your ~ to 777 (which is of course bombastically stupid), but do keep in mind that a typical home luser is running Windows, and accordingly sees their computer as their ersatz "user space".)
This sig no verb.
IBM's first PC came out in 1981, the PC XT in '82, and the Junior around '84 or so. If I remember correctly, the JX was to the JR what the XT was to the PC - slightly better specs.
there goes my pension... and only three days to retirement!
"Fiber to the home.. very high speed fiber. No reason some of this stuff can't happen."
One word. Monopolies. The broadband industry and Media conglomerates and their "control fetish". Last mile issues with the telecoms. No, IBM's idea works for businesses who can afford to overcome those issues. Some fundamental mindsets are going to need to be changed for that last mile to be anything more than two tin cans and string as far as the consumers concerned.
test, ignore, new Slashdot server setup giving trouble
Coin dollars are great for vending machines. They stink for tipping strippers at a titty bar...
This is merely important to the extent that this would bring back program optimization to the forefront.
Scientific and engineering computing really needs this. Maintaining large server farms must surely be cheaper, for the same computing power, than keeping isolated supercomputers close to where they are needed. And as the amount of computing power on the grid increases, the time you have to wait for a computation to finish will decrease.
The problem, of course, is security. Companies would be very nervous about putting valuable data on a shared server. For example, the data required for a computing task might include the geometry of a machine part or the chemical structure of a drug. The algorithms used by the software being run might also be proprietary. It's even a problem in academic computing because researchers still patent their discoveries or compete to be the first to publish a particular result.
Just how much can you trust IBM? And if the grid becomes open, with multiple companies offering their computing resources, the problem is even worse.
I know people who have generators or windmills and are connected to the electrical grid. When power demands are high, the power company actually pays THEM for their surplus power.
If I have a nice Linux cluster that meets the "standards" for the grid (whatever they are), can I sell cycles back to the provider? Or is it just one way, in which case I'm trapped into doing whatever the grid wants me to do.
Our article today sounds like batch:
"computing power of a supercomputer for a short period" although they do go on to say "Other services could be delivered in much the same way".
This would (did) work in the early days of computing, when it was virtually unheard of for anyone except for large fortune 500 companies and the US gov't to have access to computing power.
Why would anyone be tempted to return back to this model? How many sub $500 or even sub $200 dollar computers, will it take for IBM to realize computing power isn't rare or expensive?
And if a company or organizaion needs incredibly massive computing power is needed then can turn to companies like this to provide the solution, again using cheap generic pcs.
To some it all up this is stupid, and now Palmisano looks like another idiotic buzzword chanting CEO. This will be yet another blow to IBM, and it will soon (IMHO) join the growing stable of companies (Compaq, HP and the "new" Cisco) that have been screwed by a clueless greedy CEOs. Somebody needs to cancel his subscription to Business 2.0
... A cluster of these super-computer centers?
During the cold war, the CIA uses IBM to provide cover for operatives. IN exchange, IBM gets access to intelligence relating to competition.
Fast forward to today. Dozens of high quality encryption schemes foil the CIA's spying. What to do? Their friends at IBM can help again: create a new paradigm that leaves IBM in charge of all corporate data security.
</rant>
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The company I work for has 3 HP mainframes they use in production and 1 IBM AS/400.
We also have more than a thousand PC's that are connected to the company intranet.
Less then 1% of those PC's enjoys more then 40 hours of use a week.
This creates a math question. How many PC's does it take for one hour of real time to equal one hour of 1 HP work real time?
I know I didn't phrase that well. But my point is that we are underutilizing our PC's. Granted our biggest HP box has 16 processors and I forget how many gigs of memory (9 seems to stick out in my mind). But a thousand PC's somehow doing that work via some sort of distributed computing method should smack that bad boy like the bitch it is.
You mean they actually build in the processors and make them just sit there until you pay more? So you already paid for all their manufacturing costs and everything, just not for permission to use them.
Well if there was ever any doubt in my mind, this clinches it. Business is absolutely fucking evil.
In some organizations and especially in Canadian Universities where the funding simply isn't there to establish a supercomputing infrastructure (an article last week referred to a University in the Southern USA that had greater supercomputing capacity than all of Canada) the ability to purchase computing power on demand will probably be of great interest to Academics and medium to small sized businesses.
But the money for IBM wouldn't just be in the sharing of the computing power.
Say that Company A lacks the programming staff to develop a program for assessing the success of their Oil drilling or other geological analysis they need to do. What if IBM developed the custom program on behalf of the company and as well sell them the CPU time to run it. Would be a great way to increase their Consulting business and this one simultaneously.
I think it will be a very successful business model.
I'm also curious if it might on the whole reduce the power consumption of Server-Farms as fewer would be needed if IBM had a number of them prebuilt and ready to serve up power. I would imagine that a number of Hollywood studios might prefer this model to constantly upgrading their own server farms.
As for implementation of the communication end of things something like CANET:
CANET3 would probably fit the bill.
> There is no "faceless" technician at the other end
There is no fire-able individual that gets a performance review from the company. If they're unhappy with the outsourced datacenter performance, they have only two recourses: cancel the contract or sue, and I assume that contract agreements would most likely preclude the latter. The human element is completely being overlooked in these equations. Managers like pulling their staff together into a conference room and whipping their butts in times of crisis, making them feel in control of the company. Outsourcing precludes that. Sure, it will be (and has been) tried anyway, and will (and pretty much has in the case of ASPs) fail. But be my guest.
> What consumes most of the bandwidth in an internal company network is actually "raw" data.
[...]
> This means that the only bandwidth being used by your company will be to display web pages.
Hmm? Database queries are actually quite network efficient and in many respects very similar to HTTP. You send a query and get back a recordset. If you used a thin client instead, most of the information inside the recordset would likely travel across the network anyway, only in the form of more bloated ASCII-inside-HTML (to be displayed say inside an HTML table). And if the web server and database server don't reside on the same machine, you'd actually DOUBLE the network traffic.
Many cases can be made for browser-based thin client computing, but reduced network traffic definitely isn't one of them. There's nothing network efficient about stateless gobs of ASCII and graphics.
Another thing is that, as you mentioned, the ASP model is mainly suitable for web applications. Unfortunatly, that is still not the majority of applications in many corporations. There are still no satisfactory web versions of office applications, and there probably never will, because they're intrinsically client-side; if you insist on serving them via a browser, they will still end up mostly executing code (ActiveX, Java, JavaScript etc.) on the client side, but inside a sandbox, adding much headache and little benefit (think saving and printing).
As long as they keep it within reasonabl bounds.
People do not want "shared computing"; they do not want to put their data on "borrowed computers" nor do everything on "rented computing power" or "rented space". IBM should realize that most people will still want their applications and most of their processes and files on their own computers.
What IBM should be offering -- and what it seems like they're offering -- is loaning supercomputer time to people (for a price) for specific tasks which they can't accomplish in a reasonable amount of time on their own computers. This is a reasonable and useful idea; however, it is hardly new at all. At the University of Rochester, there are shared computers within biology labs, where people dump some heavy-duty computing operations and pick them up later. This went on during the 60's when computers were so expensive no-one could afford them. In short, this is hardly new nor revolutionary, though IBM may be putting a new twist on it by trying to use it as a business model.
It makes sense. After all, most people don't need supercomputing power for the majority of their tasks; why spend money on a supercomputer when it'll be unutilized 90% of the time? But what IBM can do is maximize supercomputer utilization by selling a percentage of its resources to various customers; these customers save money because they pay on a per-need basis.
For example, I often run Bayesian phylogenies. Recently, I ran a Bayesian phylogeny with about 50 taxa in it. This took 7 days on a dual G4 (2x 800MHz) Mac. That's with all of the computer's power focusing just on that. The time requires to complete the trees increases at a steep rate as one adds more taxa. If I was doing 200 taxa, it would have taken two or three months.
So this can offer a great service to many people.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Just like wordprocessors never defeated the ballpoint pen. You certainly can't write FUCK THA POLEECE on the side of a bathroom stall with Word 2000.
Perhaps they're referring to a focus on marketing this idea to people that may not know that one can do this sort of thing? I don't know, it's really a fluff piece anyway.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
From the article: "We view this as Palmisano's coming-out party"
It's good that a stodgy old company like IBM has enlightened itself enough to let its executives come out in the spotlight, but it still seems a little unfair that they probably don't throw a party to embrace every employee's sexuality.
Disclaimer: I'm a member of the Blue Collective.
It's called Capacity Upgrade on Demand (CUoD). Check IBM's site for more info.
The machines generally have all their processor slots populated, and IBM can remotely toggle them on when you need more CPU power for a workload. This is a cost effective way of providing users with the ability to upgrade as their computing needs grow. The cost of the idle CPU's is marginal when the entire system cost is taken into account.
What's that? What prevents a user from toggling on an idle CPU themselves? Nothing...other than invalidating their multi-million dollar maintenance contract with IBM.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
- Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Definitely it's timesharing. Bring your punchcards.
sulli
RTFJ.
Lots of companies out there do subcontract computing time. In a lot of cases, it would only make economic sense. Why pay for a supercomputer when you only need 1 month a year of time?
:P
Otoh, it might still be cheaper for some companies to buy super-comps or build beowulf clusters if they have so much computing that they'd be using the IBM service 24x7.
Finaly some companies might not want 3rd parties to see the data they're working on
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
IBM launched this initiative with a full-page ad in the new york times for a "business time machine" to allow you to go back in time and fix business mistakes. Here's a story on the ad. It was supposedly produced by bagotronics; the website now goes to the page on ibm's site (the picture of the device is at the top right). Here's a reuters article on the ad.
Ok, it's not a dot com superbowl ad, but still clever. A subtle way to acknowledge that their new initiative is like the old mainframe days.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Would this not be a big pot of gold at the end of the hacker rainbow?
Just making what they said in the 50's come to life again.
It seems to me that it's ALWAYS a bad idea to bet that top-of-the-line computing power by current standards is going to be a valuable commidity even next year.
How can IBM possibly expect to keep pace with distributed computing taking hold? Haven't they noticed that yesterday's supercomputers are getting clobbered by today's Beowulf clusters?
And further... what if the computing power increases in following Moore's law begins to exceed programmers' ability to waste CPU cycles? 5 years ago I knew my machine would be obsolete in 6 months... obsolete enough I'd have trouble running the latest stuff. Lately, I've been squeezing 2 years out a machine pretty easily and (XP aside) there's precious little software that I use other than games that truely requires top of the line software. Of course that doesn't mean that GM's crash modelling software doesn't need as much power as it can grab, but you don't have to look further than CGI movie rendering over the past 5 years to see how quickly power increases and how quickly cost decreases.
- StaticLimit
Maybe all of this "supercomputer" power that IBM is offering is really just a beowolf cluster of all their surplus IBM PCjr's from the 1980's.
Since the local landfill proably wouldn't take them, IBM probably decided to put them back to work...
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
I don't understand how IBM will compete against Google in this arena.
IBM's plan...
1) Pay uber bucks to create a utility
2) Market pays for computing time
3) Profit
Google's plan... [http://toolbar.google.com/dc/faq_dc.html]
1) Give away a low cost toolbar
2) Market pays for computing time
3) Profit
I'd bet on the Google horse: It costs less to feed, and wins the same races.
If you've kept up on the cost savings offered by Linux thin clients, you know that (given application support) the money in switching to that model is/will be irresistable to IT departments. Dropping your labor costs (the bulk of a mature IT department's budget) by 50% by switching away from client-server is not uncommon.
An essential element that prompted the switch away from mainframes was, I believe, the fact that user interfaces outstripped the abilities of the slow networking in use at the time, and processing power requirements by both valid apps and bloated code exceeded the hot-I/O-but-not-so-hot-CPU design of mainframes.
Now the tables have turned -- gigabit, which shortly will be ubiquitous, is good enough to get full motion hi-res decompressed video to your desktop if needed, and Moore's law has given us 2.8 GHz CPUs to write our shopping lists with.
The costs of maintaining individual desktop systems, no matter how good the tools are, will remain immense. The money saved with centralized computing can be massive, and the inherent attributes of business desktop computing will, I believe, make the client/server model an aberration in history.
Steve
1. Companies that need lots of processing power (pharmacaticals, researches, development) are way too over protective of thier information. The will not want to risk the chance of some one stealing their data. Perhaps IBM clients would be hollywood for redering CGI
2. Clustering using Linux is cheaper. CICS Cluster of Inexpensive Computer Systems, is the way to go. The rate of growth in CPU performance will makes clustering Cheap PCs together will over business the best TCO.
3. Limited market. Not everyone will need access to supercomputing. For get about outsourcing backoffice services (ie File Sharing, e-mail, database). Teleco bandwidth is still way to expensive. Plus see #1 above. Security remains an important issue.
from http://www.computerworld.com/news/1999/story/0,112 80,37826,00.html
"1956. In order to settle the government's second antitrust suit against IBM, the company agrees to exit from the processing services business"
this doesn't extend into the workplace. If I didn't get paid for idle cycles, I wouldn't be able to afford to eat!
This comment was generated by a squadron of trained super elite albino ninja chickens for you.
There's been some posts saying "been there done that, it sucked" and "companies don't trust asp's, why trust this". But what if the idea was to sell the technology to companies so they could form their own grid out of all the wasted cycles sitting on peoples desks who do nothing but check email and grind out a spreadsheet. That company could then sell their unused cycles to someone else. Seems like an efficiency gain to me if the technical and security issues can be overcome.
IBM will be making the chip for the next Playstation. It's rumoured to use grid computing and it will use parallel and distributed computing over the internet. So will i be able to logon with my PS3 to my local IBM supercomputer ? Smells like a cunning plan....
..hello ?..is this thing on ?...
I hope someone gets my joke :)
Just imagine how many frames per second could I get on this Supercomputer?!?!?!
E V E R Y T H I N G I W R I T E I S F A L S E
We're in the process of discussing a move to thin client. We have roughly 500 users. The maintenance costs of wandering around to 500 desks is tremndous. We're looking at going to a central cluster solution. Rather than each department buying a PC for their desks, we simply bill them for their CPU cycles. Those that use more cycles owe us more when it comes time to cluster in more machines. Cost effective in the long run, and a LOT less work for us admins.
I realize that's not what IBM is proposing here, but the idea of charging for CPU cycles is quite intriguing, especially when it comes time to upgrade your $40,000 box. If you can bill the users for their usage, your upgrade costs go down considerably.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
The only time you'd have some real savings is if you have truly variable needs, which I guess would be some companies, but not that many. But they've tried this since the dawn of computers, and it's never really worked out.
;)
However, with todays networks I would think booting off a gigabit LAN is doable, so I can imagine companies changing to a server/dumb terminal sysmem (again), but I don't see that server as being run by IBM either.
Of course, to make any real headway you need to get users to accept that you don't need a PIV 3GHz+ to run Word (not yet, anyway)
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The way I read it, you move the computational resources in a grid; typically a lot of resources are not used anyway. You reduce a lot of fat that way. When you find that you have peaks, you can use capacity elsewhere for a price. This requires that your own resources and the resources elsewhere are related and have appropriate levels of trust. IBM wants to be the honest broker that provides the revenues for excess capacity or collect the revenues for required capacity.
By having systems that do interoperate in this way , the systems must be self regulating healing etc. This will also mean less system management for individual computational resources. So there are cost savings all round.
Technically a lot of this can be done; it needs a getting used to new concepts and different modus operandi. And it will work for some applications and not for others; that is ok there will always be another way of using intellect.
I think most people are misunderstanding the kind of applications this is targetting. people who need a supercomputer for a definite computation can already buy CPU time.
What IBM is talking about here is the anti-slashdot effect. I no longer need to engineer my server to have it survive the peak demand of my customers. I put my application in a DB2 farm maintained by IBM, on routine days it shares a CPU with other customers, the one day where i am on slashdot and everybody wants to buy my product, IBM lets my application use more CPUs, I only get charged for a high volume server if and when i have high volume operations ( and hopefully high volume revenues).
Dev elpizw tipota, dev phoboumai tipota eimai lephteros http://euclidian.org
E.g. the example with the car-industry is wrong (I don't work in the car industry, but I can guess). By the time they are finished with their design, the group will move on to the next model, and they will still need their big iron. It's not like the researchers and engineers will first design the car, and then get transferred to the production halls where they will be producing it, untill management decides it's time to make the next model!
* Abundant bandwidth. The overbuilding of telecommunications networks contributed to telecom's crash. But the huge amounts of available capacity on fiber-optic networks will be a key factor in making on-demand computing possible, says John Patrick, who recently retired as vice president of IBM's Internet effort and now lectures and writes. "The byproduct of overinvestment is plentiful, reliable, reasonably priced bandwidth," he notes. "The byproduct of overinvestment is plentiful, reliable, reasonably priced bandwidth," HA...not in my area, can anyone say MONOPOLY by AT&T's CABLE division. If there is so much bandwidth, light me up on FIBER, bring it to my home...
This could be brilliant, if it doesn't just apply to "supercomputers" but to all computers. Consider SETI@home, distributed.net, and the others as mere proof-of-concept demonstrations, where providers donated their spare CPU cycles for free. The next step is to sell the spare CPU cycles. The entire Internet forms a "computing grid" analogous to the electrical power grid, with every computer owner being a provider.
Now obviously there are problems with this model:
1. Providers can't trust customers. Who wants to allow any old binary off the street to run on their computer?
2. Customers can't trust providers. Who wants to let their proprietary code into the hands of any kid with a few spare GHz? How can you trust that the kid didn't modify it to give fake results quicker? (A la SETI@home cheats)
Well, guess what? "Trusted Computing" solves both these problems neatly! Customers get their code signed by some "trusted" authority who certifies and guarantees that there are no backdoors, worms, etc in the code. (Perhaps with insurance payable to providers if such a defect is discovered.) Providers only get the code if their "trusted computing" chain is intact, and the code itself signs its results with a public key so they can be checked by the customer.
The only thing to work out is billing. Imagine if every computer on the Internet were always running 100%, turning electricity into money.... It would give every nerd yet another rationale for upgrading to the Latest & Greatest CPU available, which the computer makers would love.
(Yes, I know... once again, the old "Utopia is right around the corner, all we need is a workable form of micropayments!")
IBM has been toying with this idea internally for quite a while now. I tell you, it's a bad idea. Internal service delivery organizations use this model as a method to milk other organizations of money. They publish reports accounting for every query and every application run. Managers and accountants pour over these reports and DISCOURAGE people from running queries or applications unless "absolutely necessary". We end up with multimillion dollar S/390 sysplex's that sit idle.
There is another fundamental fallacy here... that is, CPU cycles are not a precious commodity. How can you sell the air? There are plenty of ways to mass computing power these days. The Arabs can set the price of crude oil because, they are the only ones with inexpensive crude oil. These days, everyone has access to more "processor cycles" than they require.
Within IBM, organizations are forced to use these models by management. Other companies will not choose to place such limitations on themselves.
Yes this concept is Timesharing on Steroids, but check what this CEO guy has already done- sold the commodity hard-drive biz and gone for Linux in a big way. He is clearly not risk-averse and assuming we all agree Linux is A Good Thing (and certainly a way to beat on Sun and Microsoft) he is not stupid. So what is he doing here?
Posters who are focusing on the U-word (utility) need to see that IBM doesn't want Joe Citizen using this. The profit levels for dealing with the general public just aren't there for IBM- Big Blue is all about the corporate or government cash.
In a word, cost savings for premier customers, i.e. the kind of people who will run up huge MIPS but not on a constant daily basis. Scenarios that come to mind beyond the car engineering ones are banks/companies/bureaucracies who have monster End Of Month/End Of year processing but reduced needs otherwise, websites that have a lower average use threshold except when the Super Bowl commercial airs, and disaster recovery (keep your disks mirrored offsite, if a disaster occurs call IBM, get your virtual mainframe up and switch to the offsite array).
With IBM's sysplexing and workload algorithms in play, tying in 'outside' 'puters will waste few resources.
I suspect that IBM's ultimate goal is disk farms on user sites and CPUs at IBM's Grid Ranch. With the CPUs under IBM's care they can really drop the TCO for the machines themselves.
That reminds me, the real cost of operating mainframes nowadays beyond the staff is the third-party licenses for the support software- security, tape libraries, etc. That's because traditionally the software vendors license by MIPS on the machine, not MIPS actually used in your LPAR (logical partition, a carved out virtual machine on a mainframe). Whenever you increase the MIPS of your machine, the third-party vendors will bleed you dry (which ultimately loses IBM customers as they go to cheaper alternatives).
IBM is beating on these vendors by competing in their arena to drive TCO down, and is also trying to get them to meter their actual usage under z/OS. So this grid thing is just a logical extension of what they are trying to do to not get run over by Moore's Law and the cost of running The Big Box.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
This setup is similar to old-fashioned timesharing, but on a far more massive scale. This puts together CPU power, network bandwidth, and storage capacity on a huge, cross-machine basis. The cross-machine capbility is the real trick.
With the technology in the works for this, you could combine together a zillion powerful boxes for the CPU power. (This would be similar to current clustering, but far more dynamic.) You could then attach an half an exabyte of storage, all of which would be pooled together for on-the-fly allocation of any given size, without any regard to which box the storage was in or what OS it ran.
All these concepts have been done before for decades. (Mainframes have done dynamic workload allocation for about 20 years, and AS/400's have used consolidated storage pools for quite some time.) However, combining them to form one massive pile of IT power, with the reliability you expect from the telephone company is a completely new idea.
You need another 10 terabytes of storage for a database expansion? No problem! Punch a few buttons, put in your Visa number, and in a couple of seconds, your filesystem is now twice as big. Maybe 2 terabytes came from a data farm in Boulder, CO, 6 from Gaithersburg, MD, and the last 2 from RTP, NC. None of that is your concern.
This, my friends, is new.
It made sense years ago. It may make sense to a very limited number of projects. But it doesn't make sense for most businesses. And I see no use for the average consumer. On top of that, the security issues would be insane. Allow our data to live on or be processed by someone else? In a shared environment? No thank you. $10B? Fear.
Maybe it's just that I'm reading at +4, but I'm suprised that nobody's mentioned Multics yet. The first thing that popped into my mind when I read "computing at a public utility" was Multics. I mean, the whole point of the system was to make computing a metetered utility. Not that any significant conclusions can be drawn from this, since Multics' failure had nothing to do with the business model, but more to do with them having overly ambitious goals for the project.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
A business will always choose a fixed cost over a variable cost. But there's many points of view.
From a system administrator's point of view:
I work in the data processing indstury, and we have a 12-way NUMA box as our mainframe. We moved from a 16-way SE-70 that we'd had for seven years earlier this year, and our software has already expanded to max out the capacity of the new NUMA unit - to the point where we've upgraded it several times.
We'd continue to expand if the perception was that we have unlimited resources.
From a business point of view:
Even if we could do our dp activities on someone else's mainframe, we would still have our system administration costs for systems that can't be moved out of the building, so our costs don't go down. We would also have to maintain in-house development machines, because we wouldn't want to pay someone else for the endless compiles that we would need while developing new software.
Additionally, we already have a huge, unamortized investment in fixed dp assets.
Currently, our systems process for 24 hours per day to meet our needs. If we were to do these same activities on a metered system, we would probably not have to process as long, but if costs are over $5,000 per month metered, it's not worth it, especially since there are no cost savings except for the cost of amoritization of our main hardware.
Corporations buy unmetered data lines because they don't want to have to deal with variable (and, in case of a slashdotting, extremely high and exteremely unstable) costs. Trying to sell a service that has a variable cost structure is good for a company, but buying a service that has a variable cost structure is bad for a company. The only time buying becomes good is when the company can't provide it for itself, as with electrical power and telecom. But it's easy to buy/build your own mainframe-class computer for less than $10,000.
--
Vote for your hopes, not for your fears - Vote Third Party
That's the model that commercial renderfarms have been using for years. Guess what - it only works up to a certain point. After that, it's more affordable to just own and operate the resource yourself.
The exact breakeven point depends on the rate charged, and utilitization. But it's definitely there. IBM's ignoring a lot of operational history and available market research, if they really think this is going to fly.
Last time I heard, supercomputer timesharing was one of the original purposes for the internet. The idea was to allow scientists to purchase computer time on some Really Big Machine somewhere to get their number crunching done. The point was to provide supercomputer access without the need to purchase or maintain said supercomputer.
Perhaps what makes this so special is that IBM is putting a pretty interface on top of it and trying to sell the feature to busineses rather than laboratories?
10 gogolplexes invested on that bussines model? then it should work! With that hard cash they could even build the recicled paper computer before us!
Uh yea.. my e-comerce site wold be very secure and cost-efective if we run all database "querys" against an IBM ubercomputer located on their facilties, and we wold save on electricity bills too!!
Why should my egineers need bad-ass cad workstations for? IBM would lease me a share of big-blue for those "render" stuffs, it's a win-win partnership!
16,777,216 comments ought to be enough for any forum!
This is not just about paying the meter. It is about utilizing all the wasted CPU cycles.
And it is massively clustered parallel sysplex.
I came, I saw, I LPAR'd
All Hail z/OS !!
I can't wait for something like that to be made. Think of the computing power you'd have to have just to display that!
-SheWhoWalksWithToesLikeCobras Please enter any 11-digit prime number to continue...
They'll need to pay royalties to lots of people, probably. Including Comstock Systems a.k.a. Hitachi Data Storage Software (acquisition). 10 patents on distributed licensing/data-collection/resale/packaging/bundli
Try a simpler word next time. Suggestion: Opinion Scoop: An item of news acquired and published by a newspaper etc. in advance of its rivals; an exclusive; a sensational piece of news Excerpted from Oxford Talking Dictionary Copyright © 1998 The Learning Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
After reading the article from the link, I was miffed about what this "on-demand computing" was and if it was any different than what's available today.
;)
In the USA today (yep, consulting on the road) The explain it like so: (Using an ordering web site as the example)
1. Each division of the company has it's own computers
2. When the orders increase in unit X, the computers deflect some of the processing to the corporate data network.
3. The newtork finds computers in other parts of the company that have excess capacity at that moment and routes the processing to them.
Side notes:
A. If the unit needs more processing than it can find inside the company, the data can be sent to other computers anywhere in the world, be processed and sent back.
B. If the economy turns sour, the unit might cut staff and let and outsourcing company handle all the order processing. Because computers would run on common standards, the division could give its data to an outsourcing firm.
I'm still miffed myself. Will this save money for companies or provide value that is worth paying for? It comes down to this, HW/SW/People/Real-Estate/Power(Diesel Generators) costs money (that's why you don't build your own datacenter) and technolgy gets old fast. If you truley can harness the X% of "wasted" computer power, in a "utility" fashion, then a miracle has occured. The technology of all technologies XML must have been mentioned somewhere and I missed it.
Article also says "grid computing" is a pre-cursor to on-demand computing. Sounds like we go back to green screens and mainframes to me. Oh wait, isn't that what the web is, but with fancy windows?
Sell my spare CPU cycles on eBay?
I think that most businesses won't have much use for this or other supercomputing apps. Like it or not, we use servers mostly for things that would not work well in an arrangement like this.
That being said, I am sure there are lots of companies out there that have supercomputers which they aren't using all the time, and if this would be secure, and less expensive, they might be willing to go to this sort of system. It would provide more flexibility. And might revolutionize that market.
Of course, *that market* is a very small piece of the computing market...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I'm a canadian!
We have dollar coins here. For those of you who don't know, it's called a "Loonie" because the coin features a Loon on one side.
A few years ago we also introduced a two dollar coin, called the "Toonie", whose name is really more of a bad joke.
It is in my opinion that with all the money our government saves by replacing the paper currency with coins we should recieve a tax credit for the cost of having all our pockets reinforced to carry the extra weight.
Those coins are damn heavy when you've got 20 bucks in loonies, and now they're talking about making a 5 dollar coin.
ATTN: Paul Martin, Finance Minister.
NO MORE FREAKIN COINS!!!!
What? Me? Worry?
I believe he is saying that those who scream about their miserable place in society and life in general during college realize a few years later that the best way to become unoppressed is to join the oppressors. "If you can't beat them, join them" in other words. It is also a backhanded remark to those who choose paths to suit the time around them, regardless of if they agree with the ideals of that path or not. Sorta like the girls who "go lesbian" in college and join all the anti-men coalitions they can, only to sometime in their last 3 semesters (read as "ohmigod, I'm about to graduate with a degree in (insert utterly unmarketable field here)! I need a man!") go straight. Hypocrits, in other words. Of course, I could be wrong.
Okay, great. When do they start? I'll take 10^20 cycles (on a power machine) asap, and pay about $1000 for it, as it will save me months on my thesis, allowing me to use mathematica, instead of re-hacking everything in C (which brings it down to about 10^14 cycles, manageable on a home pc in a reasonable amount of time). IBM, you sell to students?
I've had this sig for three days.
Nations like North Korea, Iran, Iraq and Libya can buy time for running their "scientific" tests on a computer cluster not far from being a supercomputer. No more need for Iraq to import video games and put them together as a computer cluster. :)
OH NO! Johnson left his SETI@HOME screensaver running again... thats going to cost us
The Washington Post article writes:
."
... then again, that's when I do most of my work ...). This would allow corporations to most fully utilize their computing capacity, minimizing idle time for computer processors. (Of course, for people who have been in the computer industry, this isn't a new idea ... we're just returning to our roots, in some sense).
m
"International Business Machines Corp. chief executive Samuel J. Palmisano said yesterday that his company is investing $10 billion in a business strategy aimed at getting corporate customers to pay for their computing power in much the way they now buy power from utilities: as they use it
Presumably, IBM plans to charge a higher rate during times when processing power is in high demand (regular business hours) and a lower rate during "off-peak" times (wee-hours of the day
This is not the way power is sold for most residential and commercial customers in the U.S. and abroad.
Electricity is currently sold at a fixed per-unit rate, regardless of when it is used. The cost of running that server farm during Noon on the hottest day of the year (when everyone is turning on their air conditioning) is the same as the cost of running it at 2:00 a.m. on a modest Spring evening.
Many experts have pointed out that it is this lack of "real-time" pricing of electricity that has been one of the major contributors to the recent electricity crisis in California: http://www.sen.ca.gov/sor/Energy/Realtimememo1.ht
Whether this strategy will succeed is questionable. People have forgotten that one of the failed bets that contributed to the Enron downfall was their investment in "bandwidth trading." In a market with ample capacity, there is very little incentive to trade. Unless there is a serious processor capacity constraint, I can't see how IBM will be able to make an effective market for processing time.
In IBM's DB2 database, the COALESCE function is used to replace a null (in a column named VISION or IDEAS, for example) with any value you want. The point is to get rid of the null.
..Of the hype a few years ago about slim PCs and 'dumb terminals' that have little power of their own and rely on a mainframe to handle most of the processing jobs?
It would make far more sense for IBM to put $10 billion aside to develop a p2p processor sharing application that works similar to SETI, then actually pay us netizens to install it, or offer other perks (and no bs advertising spyware crap). Paying $10 billion to double up on infrastructure that's already in place (hello, Internet) seems quite inefficient.
Not so, have you ever been to Montreal..
a large GRID of Deep Blues. that is definatly worth selling.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
No matter how many articles I've read, it always amazes me how few Slashdotters read the article before they feel compelled to post their (usually misguided) opinion. I'm sure plenty do, but there sure are a lot who don't.
IBM is working on the commercialization of Distributed Computing (henceforth, DC). This effort has been around for a while (in a related area, called Grid Computing, which some people use interchangably with DC) in the form of the Globus project, amongst others.
The concept behind DC is essentially a next-gen timeshare-- a distributed timeshare with an abstration layer, if you will. Unlike traditional timeshare, you don't specify where your processing will occur. Unlike existing projects (like folding@home, dsitributed.net), DC doesn't require that you have a parallel, segmentable computing problem.
Let's say (in your best Police Squad voice) I'm a mechanical engineer who's designing a car engine with a few thousand parts. I want to run some simulations on my model to inspect heat flows, vibration, whatever. Car companies (or the little guy with a copy of Catilla and a great idea) don't necessarily have dedicated computing resources to run my simulation. So, until now, I had to band together with a bunch of other mechanical engineers with jobs similar to mine and try to justify a giant simulation node. Or, I might convince management to outsource the computation, requiring a bunch of red tape, NDAs, contracts, negotiation, etc.
Now consider IBM, one of the largest commercial web hosts. IBM maintains giant server farms to support these services. Consider the amount of excess processing capacity sitting in these server farms because (a) a lot of servers are spitting out static pages and (b) extra capacity necessary to cover peak loading for special events.
Expand this idea to include thousands of people who need computation power for discrete, isolated projects and thousands of companies with excess computational capacity. The consumers don't care precisely where or when their computations get completed, they only care that they get done in a "reasonable" amount of time. An intermediary, which it looks like IBM wants to be, can accept jobs from them, break them into as many pieces as they can, farm them out to whichever of their suppliers has excess capacity at any particular moment, combine the results, and return them to the customer.
Even more, IBM can charge more if you want a high priority on your computation or if your job is not symmetric and must be run on fewer nodes.
Actually, if you think about it, IBM is hurting their server sales by advancing this project. Right now, they sell a lot of excess capacity to companies to cover their peak loading. If companies can dynamically purchase exactly the amount of processing they need, that's money IBM's leaving on the table. Now, companies with high-availabity requirements will still purchase their own systems with enough extra capacity to cover their own needs. But, when they're not using that capacity, they'll sell it.
I think IBM saw that the train was leaving the station. They know this technology is coming. And they see that the chance to be the intermediary in this market is worth more than the money they'll lose in hardware sales. And, they know if they don't, someone else will.
$10,000,000,000 is 10 TRILLIAN
$10,000,000 is 10 BILLIAN
Timesharing is 95% obsoleted by the availability of cheap PC's and networks. It makes sense to do without the big iron and rent it when you need it only if you don't need it often. But for the occasional need, the overhead of making the connection, establishing both business and data interchange relationships with the vendor, getting the data to and from the remote computer, and getting everything working smoothly is very ugly. If they are selling me the same generic service that they are selling to my competitor, that's no competitive advantage to me, and I surely don't want to let them know about all the specialized custom computing that I do that gives my firm a competitive advantage.
The irresistable combination of commercial supercomputing, time sharing, and web services -- if you've got a trifecta ticket in your pocket with those names on it, you're on your way.
Was way ahead of it's time. The world just wasn't ready for boxes that came in any other color than beige
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
Will this model revolutionize the way companies compute, or is this plan doomed to be another PCjr?
Is Bill Sydnes designing this one, too?
how much bandwidth could /. save if only they used scientific notation for dollar amount in the billions range and higher...
You, sir, make me embarrased to be a Canadian.
We're not all like him.
Sh!t. Somebody terminate my process now. It's wasting my money!
perhaps they should be rather investing 10 billion minus half a billion in the ultimate tivo device running linux and able to connect to newsgroups for a certain fee. If this thing would be the ultimate (note: still no tivo in Europe!) then they could use the spare processor time of the device with a certain agreement: ' say you want to have a free use of our tv-guide, you have to donate an amount of free cpu cycles to our project. This way is best for both sides.
I don't think that "leasing CPU time" is what is important here. If you look at IBM's involvement in XML Web Services and think about their strategies around Web Services, this latest announcement may make more sense.
This announcement is about "billing". IBM is going to figure out how to bill customers for information services (e.g. invoking Web Services). This is a big deal, and if done correctly, will provide a commercial framework for Internet services that will finally make the net a profitable place to do business (for everyone, not just IBM).
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
They could actually do something useful with that and buy out one of their competitors (SUNW)outright. http://quotes.nasdaq.com/asp/summaryquote.asp?symb ol=SUNW%60&symbol=ORCL%60&symbol=VRTS%60&symbol=AM ZN%60&symbol=XMSR%60&symbol=LU&symbol=SGI&symbol=G LW&symbol=F&symbol=AWE&selected=SUNW%6 0
Heh, do you get refunds on exception errors :p
Is it just me, or are we heading back to medieval times, when the monetary system was ONLY coins ? (at least in Europe) (and besides the occasional duck traded for a bottle of booze, or whatever)
Dave
FPGA, Wireless, ASIC, Verilog, VHDL, HW, 10yr exp, Team Lead, Ottawa (More? Email above. slashdotusername=dgmartin98 )
Investing large amounts of money into what at best can be a short term (5-8 year) money making opperation just seems unsound.
Computers are increasing in processing, storage, and display power at a geometric rate. Bandwidth is hitting a wall now in price and performance but an increased and more efficent infrastructure is expected to fullfill the needs. So called 'theoretical limits' are often debunked or simply worked around.
That's not to say this isn't a good idea to make money, it's simply something that could be done and put together for a signifigatly lower cost and ultimatly fullfills only a short term need.
The Internet is generally stupid
Could this merely mean that IBM proposes not to charge users for idle time on their mainframes?
a Beowulf cluster of these!
It will not be such a happy hallows eve will it now?
Today, IBM was forced to take a ten billion dollar charge on their pie in the sky scheme to charge people for computer time after two thirteen year old hackers released OPEN-SETY, which lets large corporations use their PC idletime to handle large computational tasks in the background approaching the computational speeds of even the fastest super computers.
.netscare, but was able to design the 2005 model lineup, calculate the last digit of pi, determine the meaning of life (13), as well as design a nifty new toilet for the IT executive washrooms, using nothing more than the computational time of their secretary's idle computers.
It's estiamted that GM alone not only saved 15 billion dollars by using open-sety instead of IBM's
-Bob
OK, I've been around long enough that I've been exposed to timeshare and billing by cycles on mainframes. In fact, in a previous life, our division was being charged an additional $10K/month simply because some batch jobs were running over stale data unnecessarily... but that's another story...
The real issue isn't timeshare. It's related to grid computing. How does lots of software get sold? Per CPU. How on earth can you equate that when the software can be running partially on a Linux Intel box, partially, say an AIX risc box and partially on a big mainframe running Linux?
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
There is *no* sure revenue, There is no sure revenue.
When will these companies learn? We don't want to pay to compute, we want to purchase useful computing tools. That's where the innovation comes from.
The day this works is the day the computer industry stagnates....
Blogging because I can...
"We" have gone back to dumb terminals?
*polishes mozilla which resides on-site*
hmm. I think that many of you are missing the major component that IBM is pushing - it's not hardware. Hardware is a commodity and IBM is rapidly getting rid of low margin products like that. They are keeping enough around so that they can influence the technology that they will use. A big difference, you will find, is that IBM no longer insists on using it's own hardware or software, but will willingly use other's.
Take a look at their recent acquisitions and the R&D efforts recently: a major push on High Availability, middleware, and services. IBM Global Services (IGS) is already huge. Adding PwCC to the new IBM Consulting Services completes that. So now you have some 170,000+ people all tuned to provide the value added services on whatever platform (hardware/software) that you want.
And it's just not about time sharing computers. It's what you can do with it. Sure, you can have an ordinary webserver. You can even set it up so that it can handle 100 concurrent connections. BUt what happens when Slashdot links a story to it and it is hit with 200,000 connections in an hour? For businesses, you do not want to miss those 199,900 viewers. You got them there - a bad experience is the last thing you want them to have. Sure, that doesn't happen often.
Now, suppose you are a retailer, manufacturer, or any other business that stores their data in a database. You could (1) open data center to store your data, have all the linux servers you need running MySQL to store the data. Raw data is pretty much useless so you kick off a batch run at night. No sense doing the analysis overnight - you'll only slow down the multiple clients dumping data to the database. Add to the headache, you will have to pay for an administrator, worry about backups, disaster planning, etc. and the costs go up pretty fast. Or, (2) you can contract that out. You hire CSC, EDS, IGS, or whatever company to come in and operate it for you. Or lease out servers in their space. So now you have a fixed, predictable cost with a predictable level of service, irregardless of the load you put on it. There are still the limitations that existed before. Finally, (3), you subscribe to the service, lease a fibre channel connection to the nearest IBM data center, and basically pay for whatever CPU usage you need. Suppose it's near Christmas time and you really would want sales reports at 1pm and closing time. You can do this now. You no longer have to worry about having that capacity because you know it's available. IBM will worry about redundancy, disaster recovery . No worries about the cost of more hardware than you need. And if you decide to air semi-naked women during the superbowl.. you can handle the load. Same if you were a large e-tailor: you do most of your business during the holidays - why keep the hardware for the other three quarters?
Certainly, some applications don't deal well with it. And some people like to have some more control over their IT infrastructure: the Tivoli management tools would be perfect for that. Your DBA can still access things remotely if you want. And the new consulting services (ICS nee PwCC) can certainly help identify situations where they can sell the new service.
Sure, IBM will sell fewer "boxes" as one stock analyst said. But you can get 25% margin on a server , even 40% in some. Or you can get 85% on software, or 75%+ on services. And if you have a number of these data centers around the globe, you can more efficiently use the hardware, reducing the costs to make the services and software even more attractive.
The net effect: You spend less on hardware (IBM's and others!), but you will spend more on services. Each unit of the service may cost a bit more, but however much you spend, is a lot more in the "Profit" column on IBM's balance sheets (and, hopefully, in the client business as well). And as we all know now, it's the profit that counts, not growth, or first to market, etc.
The largest complaint with the Susan B. Anthony dollar was that it was about the same size as a quarter and hard to distinguish while reaching in your pocket. The Treasury Dept solved this by coming out with a new dollar coin, roughly the same size, but this time painting it gold.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
-- Thomas John Watson, Sr, President of IBM, 1934
This is pretty much as expected from the company who, when the first computers were built, predicted that the world would need no more than a total of 5. IBM has pretty much demonstrated an amazing lack of insight into what the customer wants; this is certainly a good example.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Companies will realize that running applications written in Java and scripting languages are slower and take more CPU time and therefore, to the bean counters at least, cost more. We'll all be forced to write in machine compiled languages. I don't want to be forced to program in C++. C is fine, but C++ is so UGLY and HACKED it's just not worth it.
Well, IBM will fail once again. For the single/home user, a PC offers everything he needs: word processing, video processing, internet access, games, e-mail, etc.
.com cow, and now they are searchin' for another one. Well, they won't find it!
For a company, a computer infrastructure based on PCs are more than enough(and Unix-based O/Ss like Solaris and Linux can be used for thousand of networked computers all in the same network; most universities operate like this very successfully with thousands of users).
I don't see where the IBM plan fits. There is a trend amongst the upper management that computing some how should be "rented", because it would provide better revenue. Users with a little bit of brain though will not accept it, because unless everything is broadband, the fat-server-thin-client computing will always be a less satisfying experience than using a local PC.
And then there is the issue of security. If I want to be totally secure, then I unplug my PC from the network, and since I am physically cut-off, there is no chance of being hacked. But if I am on the network all the time, then my data are vulnerable.
They milked the fat
And another thing: with the coming worldwide economic crisis, IBM chooses to invest in such a doomed-from-the-start plan!!! what are they smoking anyway ?
It's just you. I carry several small rectangles of plastic in my wallet each of which has an effective value (to me) of over $5000.
That was classic intercourse!
I'm convinced - there is no need for more than 5 computers, worldwide. (Thomas J. Watson, Chairman IBM, 1943)
I mean, I know IBM believes in low risk, but sticking to a 60 year old business plan is really pushing the issue. ;-)
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
After all, every time Slashdot faithfully reports another 5% increase in CPU speed, don't we ask "What does Suzy Homemaker or Karl Cube need all that processing power for? 500Mhz (750Mhz/1Ghz/whatever) is more than adequate for 90% of computer users. Only Rodney Research actually needs more speed." ?
Well, here's the answer. Suzy and Karl never need to upgrade again (after Palladium anyway, spit, spit). Rodney types up his research applications on his 1Ghz PC, then when he wants to fold proteins or discover a cure for belly lint, he rents two minutes on a Terahertz cluster. Heck, if it's made accessible and cheap enough, me and thee might even consider paying fifty cents to get a five second kernel compile.
The only losers are the chip manufacturers, because their business models are based on selling us more processor power than we need 90% of the time. That's OK though, because based on past experience, Gary Gamer will always pay premium dollar to go 5% faster than his friends.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Please explain!
Think of this from the other way around. That is, not from the point of view of a net consumer of computer resource, but as a net producer. I control around 15 different PCs in all sorts of roles. All of them spend the majority of their time idle (including the desktop ones - remember, the time someone's in the office is only 8 hours out of every 24). I'd love to be able to sell that spare capacity in some form of online exchange. The obligatory "SF thought of this first" reference: Greg Egan talks about this sort of thing in a number of his books - check out Permutation City and Distress. Great hard-SF geek reading too!
This is what life used to be like in large company networks in the 70's and 80's. Mainframe accounts had timeslice limits. This seems like a very nice opportunity for IBM to haul out some of their dusty timesharing packages, dust them off, repackage them and make millions reselling them to customers.
Would someone tell IBM this is Halloween and not April Fools day !
John Manley is hte Finance Minister. Paul Martin resigned in May 2002.
Perhaps instead of one or another, there should be an algorithm to use both. Then there can be specific packages for customers in much the same way as Cell access uses minutes, calling time, region, etc.
As far as I know, larger companies usually detest pay-per-use services because if one thread goes runaway, or one employee messes up, or one metric spamload of DoS hits the server, they get a surprise spike in their bill, which plays merry hell with budgets. Pay-per-use telephone service and software licensing are equally disliked for the same reasons.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
In an sweeping old business strategy, DEC^H^H^HCompaq^H^H^H^H^H^HHP will let you use TOPS-10 for free, if you happen to have an old KA-10 in your basement. This is DEC's Time-sharing OPerating System. It's nice to see Big Blue catching up to the latest in 1970s technology!
Nine out of ten bathroom musings are written in pen (the other 1 is evenly split between Sharpie markers and car keys.)
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it around.
Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't say embrace trouble; that's
as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend, for
you'll see a lot of it and you had better be on speaking terms with it.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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