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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!"
i get ten rods to a hogshead, and thats the way i likes it!
Get yer Computons here! Only 3 for a farthing! Get 'em while their hot!
Trolling is a art,
Can the computon handle?
I like to own them!!!
so basicly what HP is saying is that depending on how hard I work the servers will effect some monthly payment I make to them.
so, does this lower the cost of service contracts becasue companies that push their servers harder require more service than those who have low or moderate useage?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Also not to be confused with a ton of computers.
I thought that was a measurement of the weight I've put on since starting to work in IT.
i wonder how many computons it'll take to actually determine the number of computons all of your different users have consumed. :-D it sounds like a complicated process and it sounds as if it is geared towards systems that are used by large numbers of people...
NIH (Not Invented Here) reported an outbreak of a new virus, now running rampant in the IT industry. Researchers are quoted as saying "We thought we stamped that out, but we are going to have to setup the quarantines again, since now HP has caught it".
Install an cluster and get all the "Computons" you want without a goofy licensing scheme.
Trolling is a art,
Here is the official conversion:
1.6 energon cubes = 1 computon
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
The MEEDO is how long it takes for me to do something.
This post is .30 MEEDOs. You owe me 10,000 dollars.
(I only need to sell one.)
"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
The rolling california blackouts are the perfect case for the advocacy of Utility Regulation (like the new 'computer utilities envisioned by HP/IBM/Sun etc).
The power companies, colluding with the marketers themeselves, PURPOSEFULLY manipulated the energy market in california to raise prices. the rolling blackouts were the 'shot across the bow' of regulation-advocates; "we'll shut your damn power off it you dont pay" extortion.
Why is this on-topic? because someday, in the future, computing-as-utility will become as necessary as electricity is today... want to get a job? have to have computing-ability. Want to pay your bills? have to have computing-ability. want to get a loan? have to have computing-ability. want to vote? have to have computing-ability.. without accepting that WHEN THIS HAPPENS, that regulation of the industry in the public interest becomes necessary... unless you want the future-monied-kings to shut down your house/town/state.
What's wrong with the good old flop? Or even simply instructions (of BogoMIP fame) or cycles? When you're dealing with the volume that grids (which is what this story is really about) will produce, you don't need a precise metric. And thanks to the Halting Problem, you'll be forced to buy the "computons" in even lots or risk losing computation time while transactions wait to clear.
The important thing here is that HP is putting forward the idea of computation as a commodity. I just wish some researchers could have published a journal article instead of letting the marketing dept. get their greasy paws all over it.
Finally, a real excuse to get these slackers to write some optimized code.
Just think of the issues this can raise with optimization. Realizing that some junior programmer just cost you 50,000 computons because he didn't initialize a variable.
Maybe this is what we need to get people to start thinking like this again. For the love of god, anything to get some cleaner code.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
How long will it be before the definition of a computon needs to change?
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
Rearrange "computons" and what do you get?
UN COMPOST
Stop messing with our heads!
Best Windows Freeware
Does that ever sound like something Professor Frink would invent or what?
I don't think so, but I'm not positive. While MIPS is a (one of many) metric of processor speed, I think the computon is more a measurement of the resources used by a corporation for pricing guidelines.
the blood has stopped pumping, and he's left to decay
the me that you know is now made up of wires
Due to the fact that it is based on the kilogram, the bang-for-your-buck value of the Computon is steadily getting worse.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
For the time wasted here, i call it the slashdoton!
I feel like the proffesor from the simpsons!
Everybody has a purpose in life, maybe mine is to lurk in slashdot.
"We will eventually get to a point where [IT vendors] charge for usage in real time," said Thornton May, a futurist in Biddeford, Maine
If you're going to be a futurist, Thornton May seems like the perfect name to have. I just don't see this guy doing construction...
...remind me of This
Unless, of course, you wish to believe the old folks who might otherwise tell you it stands for Millions of Instructions Per Second. Back in the good-old-days, before the current abundant crop of benchmarks, people tended to measure CPUs more simply. You used to hear arguments of "my RISC chip performs more cycles per second than your CISC chip" or "my CISC chip performs more work per cycle than your RISC chip." (Anyone else notice the passing of CISC and RISC from the lexicon?)
Personally, I think we need a unit to measure the accelerating number of benchmarks created every year. How about the Shtonestone?
And to stay on topic (not that it matters much on Slashdot), the name has been "computron" for years and years.
John
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.
gives a whole new meaning to RTFA!
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Skills
20 years experience with Unix
Able to turn back computon meters- saving you millions!
Works well in large groups...
This sounds like a good bit more complicated, and could lead to rather wierd results like you end up paying more for CPU time because you had to wait longer to get the computation done (it was a high-load period).
The cheapest CPU time on MTS were 'deferred priority' batch jobs. They generally only got ran on weekends and after midnight (when nobody else was using the system). If you were working at those times it was much worth your time to do expensive compiles etc. as deferred batch jobs (if the queue was empty, they'd run pretty quick, and you'd get charged about 1/10 as much as doing it from your terminal).
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
Someone please let them know they're 56 days late for their April Fools RFC.
Currently IBM gives you a server that can handle up to Z work but only charges you for X, where X is the amount you actually use and Z is large enough that you can handle significant spikes.
I am currently working on one of IBM's biggest On Demand deals. You seem to know enough about IBM's On Demand initiative to know that it's not the same as HP's angle.. at all. The article specifically mentions HP hosting the equipment, as opposed to the IBM way, which is to basically perform a server consolidation onto IBM hardware hosted at the customer's site bugged to report back to IBM utilization numbers.
There are a couple more huge deals about to go public that I can't mention here, but suffice it to say, HP hasn't won, nor can they. IBM is way out front in this arena. We just kicked HP out of a place they "owned" for many years, and replaced the equipment with IOD gear on 1/10th of the number of source servers. The p690 AIX and x440 Intel servers completely rock.
Intelligent Life on Earth
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
/.'ers...
A question for my fellow
When I read things like this, I feel very, very unhappy. I have a PC that does what I want, when I want it, and I don't pay any additional fees to use its capabilities. I don't pay more if I actually fill my HDD vs leaving it nearly empty. I don't pay more if I leave my CPU 99.9% idle compared to running three distributed clients just to keep every single cycle busy doing "real" work.
I feel similarly about the software I use. I have an OS and a few apps, and I don't pay more when I actually use them compared with leaving them sitting uselessly on the disk. I don't pay for each image I Photoshop, I don't pay for each program invoked by the OS, I don't even pay every time I decide to surf the web.
Even media files, I don't pay-per-view. If I queue up a bunch of Vorbis files, I don't pay every time I listen. Nor do I pay for watching a DVD I own.
Yet, companies keep trying to move their business models to "buy once, pay forever". I can see the obvious benefits to the company, but it has NO benefit to the consumers.
So to get to my actual question... Does anyone see even the faintest bit of logic behind these companies moving toward pay-per-use schemes? Not logic like "we'll make more money if we get enough suckers", obviously, but some real sensible reason why people might prefer to abandon any concept of "owning" the things they use daily, rather than paying continuously for "access" to them?
... yes, but in California, all computrons must pass state EMF emissions tests, and because of contamination with "e-vile bits" that have leaked into the grounding rods, a Superfund Cleanup effort has to be funded with more state bonds to the tune of 87 billion dollars. Grey Davis claims that the state was ripped off by middleman bit traders after deregulation passed, and was forced by contracts to purchase overly expensive bits. The Green Party has issued a press release saying that the evile bits are DOUBLY evile, because they were created with "brown" power, not green. The Libertarian party has issued a statement saying "who cares, let the bit bucket market decide who pays what". The Democratic party has issued a statement saying that cronies of the current administration established shell companies in offshore havens in order to not pay "their fair share" of the cleanup. The Republican party has issued a release calling everyone a "cyberterrorist" and has established "computer camps" at guantanamo bay where recalcitrant anti e-vile bit protesters go to break large bits into smaller bits with hammers. The Reform party has said that all the evile bits have apparently crossed over the border illegally, and Pat Buchanan has said we all must "breed more americans before it's too late". The Constitution party has said "toldyaso, it's the debble" and advised that all evile bits be blasted with 12 gauges. The EFF has fled to an armored compound in maryland where combining hacked GPS receivers and supertrooper stage lasers manned by union stagehands, they have issued a decree to "You want some of this? Come and get us, ****wads!"
So all in all, looks like another bad idea by those dastardly multinational heartless corporations.
Technogeek website slash-n-burninator website is exploding with posts decrying that "it's all SCOs fault, or microsoft, and we don't care who gets nuked"
Mozilla.org has issued an emergency decree that henceforth, all bits will be named firebits, until next week, when they will be called phonexiabits.
Gentoo supporters are dropping like flies as they try to compile programs that are contaminated with evile bits, and vow to never speak the word california again.
*BSD users have moved to canada en massee, the largest IT refugee movement in world history, where they have issued a release saying " eh, it's colder up here, eh, but we don't care mon, look what's legal here now".
France, Germany, China and Russia have stopped all trade with california, and the UN has put california on the "sandbox" list of contaminated areas. Unfortunately, drudgereport has broken with a scoop that in reality, all the contaminated batches of evile bits got sent to california on Cosco container ships, with joint funding from the various "axis of dastards" nations. They are also issuing a demand via the UN that all computron evil bits be measured using the metric system "or else".
In the mideast, it's the same ole crap, and no one cares really.
Time warner AOL msnbc fox cnn abc and the RIAA and MPAA have declared that they have checked and there are "no" contaminated bits anyplace in their websites, but 85 million zaZZaers dispute this, as all files that have been traded since the begining of the crisis all say $%^&**((*%^&%%&&^*^* YOU!!, and have been apparently been done by the trio of madonna, yoko ono, and william shatner.
It's GENERAL MAYHEM AND PANDEMONIUM!
In economic news, sales of manual adding machines and typewriters were brisk today.....
www.computon.ru belongs to, well... IN SOVIET RUSSIA computon measures YOU!
=)
Intriguingly that was the first link returned when I googled the proposed term.
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.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
computon: not to be confused with Computron the Transformer, formed when the Technobots merged together.
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
I agree that in its current form, this on-demand computing model will probably fail. Utility computing is mostly a vision put together by a bunch of executives that believe they can build a revenue stream analogous to power companies. They push the vision through the marketing department who make the vision all glossy and ready to sell to other companies. Research and Development teams are then instructed to come up with an implementation of the utility computing vision. From that directive you get the research guys writing papers about "computons". The rest of what gets developed looks pretty much like the bad-old-days of timeshare computer systems (charged by time and storage usage) from over 20 years ago. So far I have not seen any revolutionary technologies for utility computing, just rehashes of old ideas on modern hardware. It is still users connecting through a network to a bunch of servers with some software to account for usage. In the end, utility computing is just a name for bunch of people in suits selling IT services to a bunch of people in suits.
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.
After all... would *you* want to submit a "lightweight process" that will be measured by the compuTON?
Okay, bad joke. I only hope this gets modded down as repetitive. Someone else must have come up with this by now.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?