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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".
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It will be tought getting quarters and dimes in the floppy slot. Or is that a cupholder?
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This won't revolutionize anything... I remember this when it was called timesharing on mainframes. The revolution was moving away from that model...
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.
In the mainframe world cpu cycles are already a potential billable transaction..
So the concept is old and crusty..
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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
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!
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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More like "charge you to get back your bits. The ones in your computer and your pants."
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
...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.
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.
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.
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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.
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????
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
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).
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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(*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.
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
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
> 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
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.
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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.
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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.