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Buying Computing by the Computon
theodp writes "Seeking to emulate the pricing models utilities use to charge customers for kilowatt-hours of electricity based on the ebb and flow of power demand, HP Researchers have come up with a new unit-of-computing metric, the Computon, which is not to be confused with the 'Power Unit' and 'Service Unit' pricing metrics from Sun and IBM. California, here we come!"
Install an cluster and get all the "Computons" you want without a goofy licensing scheme.
Trolling is a art,
Researchers at Hewlett-Packard Co. are developing a new pricing approach for the outsourced capacity-on-demand computing services the company offers. But several IT managers said they're worried that the plan is too complex.
Under HP's scheme, prices would vary based on factors such as the overall demand placed on servers, storage devices and other IT resources, said Bernardo Huberman, an HP fellow and director of the systems research center at the company's HP Labs unit.
He added that a new unit-of-computing metric, which is being called a "computon" inside HP, would be akin to the pricing models that utilities use to charge customers for kilowatt-hours of electricity based on the ebb and flow of power demand.
Huberman acknowledged that the computon effort is complicated. For instance, HP will have to account for variables such as how well its data centers perform and the amount of computing resources that customers require, he said. HP also needs to figure out a way to build in pricing provisions to cover the possibility that companies will use more or less of a specific IT resource, like CPU cycles, than they have contracted for on a monthly basis.
Analysts said new IT pricing approaches are needed to support the emerging utility-based computing capabilities being offered by HP and rivals such as IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. Those two companies said they also have pricing updates in the works.
But the computon concept, which is due for initial testing within HP early next year, did not wow IT executives interviewed last week.
"It sounds too complicated to me," said Malcolm Fields, CIO at HON Industries Inc., a maker of office furniture and fireplaces in Muscatine, Iowa.
"The last thing that we need is another complicated licensing scheme," Fields said. "What we need is a quick and easy way to buy more computing power, and I need to be able to buy it in very small, inexpensive increments."
"I'm not sure I would like it at all, and I don't think it would fly," said Tim Cronin, manager of IT at Nobel Biocare USA Inc., a Yorba Linda, Calif.-based maker of dental implants. "How in the world would you calculate all the variables?"
HP probably will be able to "come up with some matrix that will look very impressive," Cronin added. But he also questioned whether IT managers would be able to measure their computon usage and whether the plan would provide cost benefits to users.
Evolutionary Step
Some analysts were more positive about HP's plan, describing it as an evolutionary step in the development of utility-based computing.
"We will eventually get to a point where [IT vendors] charge for usage in real time," said Thornton May, a futurist in Biddeford, Maine, and a Computerworld columnist. "If you want electricity on a hot day, you pay more. If you want bandwidth on a busy pipe-traffic day, you pay more."
Efforts by IT services vendors like HP, IBM and Sun to develop new methods of pricing for utility-based computing "are well placed," said Howard Rubin, executive vice president at Meta Group Inc. in Stamford, Conn.
But Rubin said the task won't be an easy one. "When true physics aren't involved, it's hard to come up with something meaningful, auditable and defensible for pricing," he noted.
In addition, Rubin said that he doesn't think rival vendors will work together to develop a standard capacity-on-demand pricing metric.
A spokesman for IBM said it's now offering mainframe Linux hosting customers a "service unit" pricing approach. The pricing is based partly on the cost of the hardware being run by IBM, as well as its IT labor costs. It runs on a free operating system for homosexuals, by homosexuals, competing head to head (pun intended) with Apple's OSX. IBM also factors in the average amount of hourly mainframe CPU capacity used over a 24-hour period and then tracks monthly utilization rates to come up with the service unit cost, the spokesman said.
In April, Sun introduced a pricing
"computron" has been used since at least the mid-1980s, when I first heard it used by an MIT graduate.
/kom'pyoo-tron`/ /n./ 1. A notional unit of
From Jargon File (4.0.0/24 July 1996) [jargon]:
computron
computing power combining instruction speed and storage capacity,
dimensioned roughly in instructions-per-second times
megabytes-of-main-store times megabytes-of-mass-storage. "That
machine can't run GNU Emacs, it doesn't have enough computrons!"
This usage is usually found in metaphors that treat computing power
as a fungible commodity good, like a crop yield or diesel
horsepower. See {bitty box}, {Get a real computer!},
{toy}, {crank}. 2. A mythical subatomic particle that bears
the unit quantity of computation or information, in much the same
way that an electron bears one unit of electric charge (see also
{bogon}). An elaborate pseudo-scientific theory of computrons
has been developed based on the physical fact that the molecules in
a solid object move more rapidly as it is heated. It is argued
that an object melts because the molecules have lost their
information about where they are supposed to be (that is, they have
emitted computrons). This explains why computers get so hot and
require air conditioning; they use up computrons. Conversely, it
should be possible to cool down an object by placing it in the path
of a computron beam. It is believed that this may also explain why
machines that work at the factory fail in the computer room: the
computrons there have been all used up by the other hardware.
(This theory probably owes something to the "Warlock" stories
by Larry Niven, the best known being "What Good is a Glass
Dagger?", in which magic is fueled by an exhaustible natural
resource called `mana'.)
What'll be interesting is when consumer-conglomerates pop up (akin to SETI@home or Folding@home or spamkillers@home) to sell excess processing cycles from home computers... There's many more of us around than there are resources at HP...
-T
...remind me of This
First off, let me say that I agree in one respect: if one or more companies are given a monopoly for providing electricity, then they must be regulated.
Having said that, what we saw in California's gray-outs was not a consequence of deregulation. It was a consequence of a preposterous regulatory policy. IIRC, the California utilities were explicitly forbidden from raising the rates that they charged to customers in order to cover the rising prices that they were facing.
This is nothing but price controls, and price ceilings will virtually always guarantee the creation of shortages.
By subjecting the utilities to the open market for the purchase of electricity, while at the same time prohibiting them from engaging in the rational pricing activities required by an open market, the state of California created the perfect conditions for that nightmare to occur.
You can't blame so-called "deregulation" for it. That's as silly as believing that NAFTA creates "free trade". Genuine free trade doesn't need an encyclopedic and baffling legal code to enforce; it simply requires the elimination of tariffs and other burdens upon commerce. By the same token, it's ridiculous to call something "deregulated" if the players can't set their own prices.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
This is the kind of scheme AT&T originally wanted to use to provide it's customers with computing power. Actually, that's why they developed multics (kind of). And of course, UNIX killed it. Just like cheap servers kill this kind of 'IT-on-demand' stuff.
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Crudely Drawn Games
HP didn't invent this idea by a longshot. While at MIT doing an undergrad EECS degree, we bandied about the idea of computrons (a metric of computational power, roughly equivalent to an abstracted number of instructions on a standard machine, but definitely not a direct measure of CPU cycles) and it wasn't new then, back in the early 80s.
Further, one has been able to purchase time on supercomputers at varying rates since there have been supercomputer centers (again, early 80s?) where the rates depended on time of day, requested priority, etc. While I have no direct knowledge, one can readily assume the same was true even with batch processing mainframes: pay more and your job gets put closer to the top of the stack.
So, what's new then? HP wants to factor in more variables in their pricing structure. This is a big deal?
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.