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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?"
"We view this as Palmisano's coming-out party," said Thomas Bittman, an analyst at Gartner Research. "The industry will be measuring IBM against this as a benchmark for years."
Well, here is Gartner Group, missing the boat again. SimUtility has been doing this for years now, but because IBM is getting in to the market its news?
Timesharing of computers is a very valid, and far from dead market for computing. There are a lot of companies that do not want to buy their own supercomputers, which will likely sit unused the majority of the time. As for the example of a car manufacturer doing testing on a new model, this already happens as do many other organizations.
- America's Cup boat designers
- Racing teams
- Natural Resource Explorers
- scientific organizations
- and many many more
We're not exactly talking about a new or even revived paradigm. Timesharing never died.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
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?
...especially if its Windows run and goes down once a week, cutting into your bought utility time.
Well, all that you would need at your location would be the equivalent of an Xterminal, and you would have all you need. Why would you need more than visualization of the data at your location? If it is a metered utility, you should be able to access it from anywhere negating the need for data transfer from their cluster of supercomputers.
I doubt that they would use a system that goes down. Often supercomputers are clustered and use a common set of storage space that would allow migration of users and processes between systems. There should be minimal downtime in the final system-- the equivalent of current utilities. Also, they would likely only go down when your other utilties went out (lines cut, etc).
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.
If IBM did this and was successful, I'd feel sure that Sun, MS, Intel, and maybe others (does Tera still exist?) would start their own shops as competition. And companies are already putting their eggs all in one basket, but now it's just a basket that is their IT department.
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.
So, as your desktop you have access to this system. Maybe you are using only 20 CPU minutes per month as a standard desktop user. Imagine a company that has 10k users that would only use 20 CPU minutes per month. I'd think it would make sense in that case. Similar systems already exist, and they're called ASP's (Application Service Providers), and they already work on a similar concept.
The DOD and others already sell supercomputer CPU hours. I had a friend who had ~100000 CPU hours available to him on ASCI Red (for rocket and combustion fluid dynamics simulations). IBM is just formalizing it a bit more.