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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...
In the mainframe world cpu cycles are already a potential billable transaction..
So the concept is old and crusty..
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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.
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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.
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).
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.
This is not just about paying the meter. It is about utilizing all the wasted CPU cycles.
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.