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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?"
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?
In the mainframe world cpu cycles are already a potential billable transaction..
So the concept is old and crusty..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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
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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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.
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.
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).
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."
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
He didn't say bad, he said immature. Lots of things are immature that aren't bad. Just because they aren't bad doesn't mean they'll be the same in 20 years.
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).
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This is not just about paying the meter. It is about utilizing all the wasted CPU cycles.
People who aren't up to speed on their OO languages are most likely to poo-poo it. Those who fully understand AND use it daily see the others as being short sighted.
The Washington Post article writes:
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... 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).
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"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.
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.