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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.
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.
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
...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.
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.
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????
"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."
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.
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.