Slashdot Mirror
Sun Enters Grid-Computing Rental Market
mOoZik writes "BBC News is reporting that Sun Microsystems has launched a pay-as-you-go service which will allow customers requiring huge computing power to rent it by the hour. "Why build your own grid when you can use ours for a buck an hour?" asks Sun's COO Jonathan Schwartz."
And yet, it will probably be very cost effective for certain applications, where the cost of building and maintaining your own computing grid would be prohibitive.
Somehow the thought of the world moving back towards "mainframe" style computing with truly "central processors" and everyone with a terminal in their home is comforting in a nostalgic sort of way.
Does that mean spammers don't need the grid of zombie windoze boxes? So sun is competing w/ msft.
causes gridlock, everyone knows that
haha the front page advert made the news
Eat my SETI@Home dust!
Carousel is a lie!
Looks interesting but IBM are doing a similar thing with their "on demand" servers and have been for a while.
no liscensing...? inevitabely cheaper? Well, I don't know, maybe all-round just better?
I like suggestions, but I don't like contributing towards them.
imagine a beowulf cluster of these.....oh wait it is already a grid. hmmm. Actually this could be really cool. I wonder how many companies will want to use it though. I think the security concerns (handing Sun your information, the possibility of someone else recovering the information at a later date and so on) may scare some companies off.
As a SUN bigot I have been more and more challenged to find reasons to remain faithful. This shows some promise.
I wonder what will happen to this technology. It does seem like it could be useful for a number of applications (university research, for example). If you had a big problem that you spent a lot of time preparing, and then needed a bunch of processing power, this seems like the ideal solution. It certainly is cheaper than building your own giant cluster... but as the first poster pointed out, you pay per CPU per hour, not just per hour.
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
Isn't the point of super computers, and clusters to do something really fast. This means having a custom system, and custom code, custom network setup, etc, for your problem.
If you can solve your problem in an hour anyway, I dont think its worth the time to have a grid computer do it. You might as well just run it on your own system, however big.
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
"Why build your own grid when you can use ours for a buck an hour?"
So I can charge 90 cents an hour.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
It sounds like that... a commodity... or a utility. This isn't new per se, but being able to tap into that type of processor power at a fixed price point could potentially move companies like Sun and IBM toward that added avenue...? or am I missing something..?
Blacker than my baby girl's stare. Black like the veil that the muslimina wear. Black like the planet that they fear...
1- Insert coin here. $1 for each CPU per hour.
2- Insert DVD containing program in the tray on your right.
3- Please wait...
I was reading about this, it was on the right and side where slashdot shows their ads... kinda funny
As I loaded Slashdot, there was an ad at the top for...
you guessed it...
The Sun Grid, available for $1/cpu-hr...
Are you sure Slashdot isn't selling advertising space disguised as news items?
Does anybody know how you upload a job, get the results back, etc.
"Why build your own grid when you can use ours for a buck an hour?" asks Sun's COO Jonathan Schwartz."
I feel a little wierd paying for my grid computing with venison.
It must just be me.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Schwartz says computing will become a commodity like electricity.
Thank goodness, I was starting to think they'd REALLY gone off the deep end...
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
From TFA:
:)
Mr Schwartz ran a demonstration of the service, showing how data could be processed in a protein folding experiment.
Of course, if your experiment is cool enough and academia-related, there are always other ways to get computing power. A similar chemistry experiment was performed using grid-computing in Canada, utilizing computing power from universities all across the country. http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~ciss/
Now, granted this wouldn't be applicable to a lot of businesses, which is Sun's target audience. But the CISS project has a cooler name
I'd be very interested in knowing how much it would be to render something like a Pixar all-CGI movie on their grid.
For all those who keep asking about cost-effectiveness... don't forget that when you rent from a utility grid, you don't have to worry about obsolescence - it's someone else's problems. You're not throwing out a bunch of P3s because P4s are available and better price/performance when the second project comes along. Renting CPU time is an operating expense. Running your own compute grid is both an operating and a capital expense.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Sun's Overview
Grid computing always seemed like a stupid idea to me. Computing resources are cheap; it's managing them and setting them up that is expensive. Dedicated machines are cheaper to manage and easier to set up than grids of under-utilized computers. Now IBM or Sun gets the cost savings of a dedicated grid of cheap hardware, and you get to pay for to do the tricky stuff, every time you want to run it.
At least this business model has the profit step really obvious. I pity the people who get to work with the IBM or Sun (or even internal) grids, though, and I pity even more the people who get laid off so that their salaries can be redirected to funding grid rentals from IBM or sun.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
It's so true. My first computer was a Commodore 64. Microsoft all the way.
The ad served by osdn for this article was this sun grid. Actually the ads appears all over slashdot and other sites now.
Anyways, here's the official sun page for the grid and a datasheet in pdf.
Funny how on the right side of my screen on the main slashdot page, I see a big ad from Sun about how I can now rent CPU time for a dollar per CPU hour. This article appears to be a paid ad, approved and probably written by Slashdot editors because of Sun's payment.
...there will probably be several research businesses and institutions that will be tricked into thinking that they need to use this pay by the hour grid instead of making their own which would be more cost effective.
Considering these ads have only been on slashdot all day long..
I love how a good deal of the slashdot community are supporters of open software and standards.. and yet every day that I read a story on slashdot, about how so and so country / state / organization is implementing foss, right SMACK in the middle of the page is an add from MS on the "Facts" about TCO for Windows vs Linux.. or "Facts" about Performance..
Should be "News for Nerds, Irony that matters.."
The road between democracy and tyranny is paved with secrecy in the name of security.
I learned about this earlier this morning from the ad on the /. front page.
Fire the editors and just have a page of techhie ads, we'll get more timely info!
for the accompanying banner-ad. When did /. become a shill for Sun?
It's a very dark ride.
this is slightly grid-related, and i haven't seen any other news stories on it, so, gmail just gave 50 gmail invites to quite a few of its users, pretty much throwing all exclusivity out the window but also rubbing it in my face ;) that they have more free space to give away just to me in invites than i have on my hard drive. i'm in awe of their infrastracture.
I can buy a pretty decent computer with a modern CPU and lots of RAM for under $500 - maybe as little as $300.
So unless I need my results very soon after posing the problem, I'm better off spending $500 bucks on a PC and running my problem for 20 days than I am buying 500 CPU-hours from Sun and getting the answer back very quickly.
But Sun must have to schedule their system - and you have to go through the grief of sending your program to them, getting it to work on their grid, paying for it, etc, etc. So you know it's not going to be available on-demand, *instantly* - so you might have to wait several hours before they can schedule your task. This facility is only going to be useful for things that would take an eternity to run on a single PC.
Even if I need the results quickly, unless this is a one-time problem, I'd be better off buying a pile of cheap PC's than using Sun's facility. If I need to run a 100 CPU/hour problem often, I can justify buying a $10,000 20 PC cluster for just 100 runs.
Bun if Sun's niche is big problems whose results are needed quickly *AND* which are not run frequently - then there is still a problem because you just know it's going to be quite a bit of grief to get your code ported over to Solaris (or whatever they are running) - to get your data onto their disk drives - to get the results back. If you only run this program once - then that overhead will kill you - and you'd *still* be better off buying your own systems.
FWIW: IBM offer a very similar service - with very similar problems over pricing.
www.sjbaker.org
So Sun's finally found a use for all of their spare inventory.
It's funny how old ideas become new again though...Is Jonathon Schwartz/Sun trying to become the new Ross Perot/EDS?
in fact, they announced this model almost half a year ago... And please note that this includes no grid soft by now.
The Sun has launched a pay-as-you-go service which will allow customers requiring huge solar power to rent it by the hour.
Solar power costs users $1 (53p) for an hour's worth of light and heating power on land covered by Sun.
So-called fusion reaction is the latest buzz phrase in a solar system which believes that solar energy is as important a commodity as hardware and software.
The Sun likened fusion reactions to the development of electricity.
'Buck an hour'
The system could mature in the same way utilities such as electricity and water have developed, said the Sun.
"Why generate your own power when you can use ours for a buck an hour?" he asked in an address launching Sun's quarterly solar eclipse event in the center of the Solar System.
The star will have to persuade the entire galaxy to adopt a new model but it said it already had interest from planets in the milkyway, andromeda and B53 stellar clusters.
Some of them want to book capacity of more than 5,000 TeraWatts each, Sun said.
Mr Sun ran a demonstration of the service, showing how fusion could be performed on elements.
Hundreds of atoms were fused simultaneously, generating energy for a few seconds each.
Sigh....too much time and an agile mind.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Will Sun (or IBM) provide commercial software as well as CPU time, or must user's pay rent for the software as well as the hardware? What steps will these companies take to prevent data from company A being seen by company B - hell, fishing for such might be a neat form of industrial espionage.
They've got to compete with real cheap hardware, too.
I'll donate my domain's idle CPU tasks to somebody elses grid in exchange for whatever task i might need later. Somebody design the
Acrylic Bubble Panels www.beyond7.com
Is it just my imagination or I saw ads from Sun before this story was posted?
If ads are ahead of news, the subscription is pointless.
by means of $1 per CPU hour, are they referring to a p4 or a sparc processor ? At what speeds ? This can make a huge difference how quickly your CPU intensive problem gets solved.
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
It's running on Big Iron ; and irony as in "built from iron" may apply.
Still, I do wonder how much freedom people will have to carry out private experiments. Not much probably...
The Seventies came back in fashion, why not in computing.
I think that BBC should stop using stock images if they don't actually have images that pretain to the story. I mean, this isn't some high school jornalism class.
Hey, if they have CPU's and want venison, and you have venison and need CPU's, isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work?
Freedom: "I won't!"
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Read "under the reigns of Linux" as "under the reigns of IBM". Here follows the ammended post:
Haha, how cynical! But given they're in competition and not collusion with IBM (for now) plus the 'traditional solutions', perhaps that is second order in their minds.
Where this is going of course, as the article touches on, is the commoditisation of raw computing power, making it a product like iron ore, coal or oil. Genericism will, IMHO, be a really interesting force behind evolution of computational techniques over the next 10 years.
With genericism perhaps there can be no monopoly in provision of computing power, or more specifically for Sun, there is genericism until we get to the buts-and-bolts Solaris and then we get a monopoly in proven scalable OSes and as long as they can hold off Linux snapping at their heels under the reigns of IBM, then they'll have their monopoly and that is step 4; which leaves holding off Linix presumably as step 3, just you forgot to denote it '???'.
1. 50 years of rented computing history
2. Add a Buzzword and slap "NEW" on it.
3. Press release bonaza!
4. Profit?
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
big schwarts =O
OR
they could use it to predict how dummed down people will be in 5 years and use that to push the maximum user-friendliness into Windows..
Ohhh, I'm just joking really....
Can you imagine renting a Beowulf cluster of those babies?! That'd be awesome!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Now we need a Linus Torvalds version 2.0 to build a free open-source P2P Beowulf cluster over the Internet.
Imagine playing Doom 3 on a P-II, with the graphics being rendered by an Athlon64 somewhere in the Internet.
Now that many computers are connected to the Internet with fast DSL connections, it would be very beneficial for all if someone could start such a project.
The basic software already exists and it is in the public domain: MPI.
I explain this idea in more detail on my blog.
How can we submit our programs? Punchcards are OK I guess, but do they have magnetic tape?
Ignorance is the root of all evil.
It's nice that there might be a unidirectional market for this, but what about a shared system where you trade your idle time for the right to use someone else's computer during your peak time? End users tend to want a lot of peak power but little average power. Grid computing would let you spread the peak out like a capacitor. If the average user needs N times their CPU to run an application at realtime speeds and they only use this peak for 1/N parts of the day and are idle the rest of the time, you can have N users from around the world distribute their load onto each other's machine.
This would work for applications that don't have low latency (e.g. FPS games would be out) and applications that don't have high bandwith (e.g. compressing movie files) but it would work for things like semi-professional graphic artists who can't afford renderfarms. By letting other people use their machine for 1-1/N of the day, they get a near N increase in computing power at peak times.
You could have every machine in a company run a VM at the lowest priority and share the cycles for this VM with other companies around the world. You would get some use out of all that idle time on modern machines. You could also have a company's engineering department run their simulation on the company's accounting department's machines since those machines are probably idle all the time and the simulation machines have a high peak CPU requirement.
This would even work well locally if IBM's Cell technology delivers. Your TiVo can offload the processing for digital compression into the chips in your PC, DVD, and other high end processing systems as needed or vice-versa the next time your PC needs to compress a bunch of files.
Given all the idle time on home machines, this might be a bigger market than supercomputer grid clusters.
--
Free iPod? Try a free Mac Mini
Wired article as proof
Maybe I'll be able to load a Java application in less than 30 seconds with this.
Last night, my elder Computer Architecture professor was talking about how come computers he worked on in the 1970's could go for well over $5000 an hour.
"Today, by comparison, it's essentially free" he said.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
I've seen suggestions to deal with the spam problem by having the sender pay some cost to the recipient for email.
Factor that into grid computing of some kind: you give up some slice of your processor to the recipients of your email, at a time of their choosing, or you can use a slice someone else has already given you.
Spammers fall to their knees as their computers, whenever they connect to the network, have their entire processor dedicated to other people's jobs.
If we can just get Sun, IBM and others to work on this so that something like this can become ubiquitous quickly....
If they were Opterons, it would make sense though.
The Raven
So I've already seen a lot of replies along the lines of "hey, I can buy a computer for $500; if I run it for over 500 hours, that's cheaper than what Sun's offering."
Talk to your friendly data center manager. Cost of operation is a lot higher than cost of acquisition, and it *never stops*. Yes, you in your home can run your one system relatively inexpensively (you're paying for electricity and A/C, but one system gets lost in the noise of your current bills). But Real Companies have to run a *lot* of these, and power them, and cool them, and find a place to put them, and hire people to install them and maintain them.
Talk to them and you'll find that in a lot of cases, $1/hour is a lot less than what they're paying. And if you're just looking for "spot market" compute cycles, having relatively instant access to those cycles and no startup costs could be a serious win.
"Slashdot and Sun in cahoots" seems to be like a better title for this article seeing as there was no mention of this other article ==> http://www.theregister.com/2005/01/31/dutch_superc omputer/
from 2 days ago.
I wonder if he's seen this article
How will this work with license issues. Companies can't just ship licenses for pieces of software, such as vlsi synthesis to an offsite grid. The software makers generally aren't ok with things like that.
The world's larges public computing grid was launched at the beginning of December 2004. www.globalgridexchange.com The entire goal of this company is to give the power of grid computing at a reasonable price to anyone who can program in Java. My guess is that it's even lower than Sun's offering. If you don't need any more of an incentive to give it a shot. They even give you a free trial period where you can use the full potential of the grid.
I can remember blowing $200 per minute on the Univac 1108 at Georgia Tech, when my program got into an infinite loop.
Our datacenter costs include UPS cost, cooling costs, rack space, operators, 24x7 on call techs, backups, off site backup storage, which multiple the CPU box cost by several factors.
The current big users of this are financial institutions running monte carlo analysis of stock and commodities markets - they use thousands of CPUs at a time, every day.
The other nice feature to this, is you get glass-house data center capability, but can turn it off, which is not as easy with your own lease agreements, etc...
Do the math. (anyone else remember those old Jaguar ads?) A basic Xserve runs right at 3 grand. Upgrade that some (memory to the dual proc 2.3 ghz model), throw in overhead cost for a fast network, some storage, head nodes, etc... and how much are you actually talking in terms of (amortized cost) for an xserve in a cluster? Let's say 5k (an overestimate I'd say, but I didn't go try to price out a fast interconnect unlike hitting apple's page for an Xserve price real quick).
That's for a dual processor box too, so cost per processor is more like 2.5k. So, ask now how long you have to use that machine before you've made the cost of using sun's service?
Let's simplify: 4.8k for the xserve, 2.4k per processor. That's only 100 days running flat out. A third of a year (less!). Yeah, you aren't likely to have the machine loaded 100%, 24/7 yourself, but I'm sure when the Xserve cluster here at UIUC is officially open it will be pretty much running 100% 24/7, because the old PC cluster it's replacing was always running nearly flat-out. The apple replacments are currently running about 40% load and they aren't even open to "the public" as it were. (with 10% additional being used to tune the cluster by our resident parallel expert)
Yes, there's system administration overhead, and cooling and power and all sorts of other things you need to take care of too. And, for places that aren't a university that don't have the resources to deal with that, Sun's grid may be a good deal. Or places that won't load the machine up 100% 24/7.
But for a large compute cluster that you're going to keep pretty busy, you can do better.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
Now what IBM has been doing is not Grid. You basically rent a machine for a certain amount of time. You actually start with a small test cluster, then when it works, your "image" is then transfered to the real thing.
Grids are designed so that everything you need for your code is on the grid you are using (including data). On-demand is renting cycles.
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
Sun are entering this marketplace late in the game. Not only that, but the pricing of $1 per CPU hour isn't even close to competitive in the current market. There are plenty of vendors that offer grid capacity on a 'peak demand' basis for a lot less than $1 per CPU hour.
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
Do they charge you a fee if you return it late?
Somehow the thought of the world moving back towards "mainframe" style computing with truly "central processors" and everyone with a terminal in their home is comforting in a nostalgic sort of way.
Yeah, until P-1 pokes his head into your terminal and says "Hello! Where's Gregory?"
(For any kiddies that may be reading this, that joke is a reference to The Adolescence of P-1, a novel about an AI that is birthed in mainframes, gains sentience, and eventually ends up hiding out in the primordial Internet in order to survive.)
It's not surprising that computing has returned full circle to timeshare... its that cycles have achieved currency.
Sun are trying to assign a "store of value" for the CPU cycle at $1/CPU/Hr. For Sun to achieve the promise Mhz Money, ie. store of currency, their clusters must produce.
Despite the fanfare, marketing and posturing, the only thing Sun are storing are cycles. This is a pure "warehousing" scheme, storing cycles and charging rent for its use.
Interesting if only they leverage Sun into the branded warehousing business...
Depending on how they bill this could be very usefull for chip simulation as well. I setup a 12 node cluster at a previous job and we had jobs that took 10-15 hours. Although I have to admit that a major factor in the size of the cluster were the simulation software licenses.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1758758,00.as p
is the article I read
I don't think 'betting the farm' on on-demand computing is a good idea for sun. The market is there and has money, but I don't think a company like Sun can sustain itself on almost exclusively this.
IBM does this with their servers, but if they didn't have a bunch of customers also buying the systems whole working to help subsidize research and development of the servers, not to mention manufacturing the systems in volume, the revenue from on-demand would not be sustainable.
I found the comment about IBM pensions amusing, but the reality is that while IBM does have armies of people getting paid keeping 1$/cpu hour from sustaining the company, the statement ignores how much broader IBM's scope is compared to Sun's present and plan.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
A lot of people assume "CPU power is everything!" but that's not really true. Questions that haven't been answered, that are absolutely vital to how good a deal this is:
How much RAM per process?
How much connectivity between systems? (Gigabit switch per rack? Better?)
How many available disk space, and how fast can it be accessed?
And, of course, how *fast* are the CPUs?
I'd want a LOT more info before I even considered using that service, and I just can't find where the info is listed.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
The Sun grid costs $1:CPU:h, but it can be "test driven" for literally any budget, to the dollar. So an app doesn't have to invest real money for runtime until it's ready. The real promise of this rental grid lies in porting apps to/from it and a different grid, immediately. If it meets certain specs, and other grids on the Net do too, one's code can pay a minimal fee (like a dollar) to install its "spec test" code on each available grid, find the best value for its runtime, and run there.
That mobility would really change the computing landscape. SETI@Home type distributed processing teams could market their runtime grids. Supercomputing import/export rules would be thrown into a howling wilderness. And speculative investments in raw CPU power could have a market for growth.
--
make install -not war
Ok. Following on from that, assuming you were operating a terminal...
If you used it 12 hours a day of straight 100% CPU use, for 365 days a year itd cost:
$4380
If theyre upgrading, and maintaining...
You would also spend an awful lot less that that because you wouldnt be running the cpu flat out.
Do thet sell disk space too?
Companies can't just ship licenses for pieces of software, such as vlsi synthesis to an offsite grid. The software makers generally aren't ok with things like that.
Yet. Watch publishers of proprietary programs start offering "Grid Editions" of their software, licensed specifically for upload to a rented cluster. Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of revenue streams?
Huh. From what I heard, the systems are not sparc boxes but opteron ones. zippy.
Maybe pixar could offer to pay a lower rate for a lower priority of job. That way they could suck up all the spare cycles whenever others weren't paying.
check-out-the-clip-art-scientist dept I think you mean "stock photo."
I'm running a fluid-dynamics simulation for a super-secret aircraft/submarine/time-machine. Can I guarantee the security environment for my processing? No? I guess I'll be building my own cluster, thankyouverymuch.
And these companies are...? Links, please.
And these companies are...? Links, please.
...easy enough to find if you're in the marketplace for serious amounts of grid computing capacity :)
I would post some links, but the company I work for is currently in negotiation with vendors on this topic and so I'm taking the prudent approach.
Maybe if you're a smaller customer then $1/CPU hour might be good for you. For institutional sized customers though, you CAN get a much better deal than this.
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
Not to be a smart aleck, but so what?
Do you really think the work you do has anything to do with the work everyone else does? You might as well claim there's no need for big trucks or railroads, because you can buy an economy car, put a *really* low gear in it, and eventually you can deliver anything, anywhere.
The fact that you only need to haul a small trailer now and then has nothing to do with the fact that someone else may need to haul enough steel to build a World Trade Center. And if you think you're going to haul that steel cross country with a state of the art Kia, you've lost your mind.
We have 200+ systems in our sim farm at an average speed of 1200MHz. We really need more power, but can't afford to replace all the systems every 1, 2, or even 3 years. And if we had to run everything on one system, even the fastest PC available today, we'd be out of business in short
order because our schedule would be slipping faster than we could update the customer.
If this Grid of Sun's ran Linux instead of Solaris, I'd be seriously looking at it. As it is, we have been switching from Solaris to Linux because licensing costs for the tools we use are much lower for Linux.
Colocation and renting time on a grid are not the same market. Consider:
"Renting office space is not a bargain compared to buying real estate." Well, in some cases that's true, but it's by no means always so. The advantages of renting office space are quite similar to renting grid time.
I just visited the site and tried on a few of the PDFs. It seems to be aimed at higher markets, and maybe they wont rent out single processors. I was hoping I could use this as a webserver on a single CPU if cheap, but $700 a month isnt.
I was compiling kernels for an embedded project a while ago, and many flags of the linux kernel makes it crash, especially with the -tiny patches. I have a PIII at home, so recompiling after each crash was a royal pain.
So the idea was I'll rent a grid of CPUs, and iterate through all possible flag combinations (gcc flags, config options, patches even) and download a large number of small compiled kernels, and try the successful ones out for size, to find the smallest kernel I can compile for the project. Unfortunately it gets way too expensive, and I'd much rather replace my motherboard and cpu with an Athlon64, or two, and leave the thing running for a week. Or a year.
The grid isnt for everyone. Its for people who know exactly what they want, know about the parallelism of their problems and how to make highly threaded apps, or distribute the execution across CPUs. Its not for you and I.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Now, the problem is that automatic vectorization works well-enough only if your language is Fortran (which has no dynamic memory). I guess that's ok, since a lot of libraries are in Fortran. But the language itself is grotesque (after all, it's the first real programming language), and a lot of people just write their stuff from scratch.
At the same time, manual vectorization can make your code completely unreadable.
The Raven
Isn't anybody leasing CPU time on, say, amd64 machines? Somebody asked me where they could get that kind of time but I didn't know...
The price of $1/hr seems high, but let's say you want to do it yourself...
Buy 100 amd64 boxes - say $3K each after you factor in racks, switches, etc. $300K
Pay 2 staff people full-time to administer $200K/year
Rent space, pay for power, etc - $2K rent/mo + $1/kwh, 10KW/hr = $10/hr = ~$2000/mo = $48K/year
Over 3 years (useful life of the cluster) this adds up to more than $1M.
However there are 26280 hours in 3 years so you would pay $2.6M to rent these hours from Sun (of course, sparc != opteron either in price or power, but...)
So if you expect to keep your cluster more than 38% utilized you win by doing it youself. That is, assuming you have the money up-front...
Is it right for you? I have no idea, but I know someone who can advise you :)
I heartily hope that what Sun (and IBM) are doing with renting grid computing time takes off. I believe it to be a good idea and a useful service. However, if somebody tries to patent it (or a business model), please refer to the public-released idea at http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Distributed_20Compu ting_20Business_20Model#1057251600 to see if this idea from 2002 can be used to invalidate the patent.
Funny...now you can buy "grid computing time" on a network of computers. Back in the day, you could buy "computing time" on a powerful mainframe. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Demonstrant's Open Source Tools
DigitalRibbon.com is doing this exact same thing. we have priced out our contracts as low as .35 Cents for 700,000 CPU hours with a 16 Terabyte bata back up. We also have resolved issues of pricing to performance.
This is the new Paradigm Shift in how computing is utilized. Digitalribbon.com is already doing it. http://digitalribbon.com/constellation.html Necroman is also correct infiniband is very expensive!
Let's hope it's not still running...your bill would be astronomical by now...
I was wondering why I was suddenly getting more spam again, now I know.
http://www.globalgridexchange.com They let you try out time on the grid so you can decide if you like it or not, or just finish your project before the trial period ends.
"Build it and they will come" is attractive if you know they'll come but maybe Gateway had it right: rent out time on idling in-store demo computers. http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1125371 ,00.asp
:)
Let's see... Over 100 Apple stores, Xgrid http://www.apple.com/acg/xgrid/ iPod Linux...
Pixar may have a new place to render movies.
MD
There are 8760 hours in a year, so Sun would charge $8760 per CPU-year, which seems like a lot - you can buy Pentium white-box computers for about $200-300, and probably AMD64 for around $500 with minimalist video and CPU more comparable to a Sun. Call it $876, just to be a round 10% of Sun's yearly rental, and a lot of technician time per box. Alternatively, blade servers are going to cost you more per CPU, but be a lot easier to manage, and they're still easily under 20% of Sun's price. Obviously if you need to run one problem on 1000 CPUs for a couple of days, renting time makes sense, and if you need to run big-CPU problems all year, buying it's likely to make sense.
Not counting labor and real estate, the tradeoff's probably about a month or two of usage - a university can almost certainly cost-justify building their own, because they'll find ways to keep it busy. A business might or might not, and the real advantage for a business is that they get answers back in days instead of months.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
OK, it's not just about CPU power, it's also about vast amounts of ram, and time critical applications. A lot of people are saying it would be easier to run their program on a single PC over 41 days than spend $10,000 on the Sun cluster for an hour. But sometimes the programs Sun is targeting would just not work practically on a single PC, or even a small cluster. Take the 3D Animation Industry for example. One of the hardest programs to run are Fluid Dynamics software as it requires a very long time to run, and also requires excessive amounts of Ram. I have used Aura and Glu3D and they will happily use up 2 or 3 Gbs of Ram (the max Windows allows to a single process), and it will take over 24 hours to create a few hundred frames of animation. If you are a high end Visual Effects studio tasked to create the latest effects on a blockbuster movie, you can't wait months for the computers to sit there and think. They have to turn over shots daily. In that case, you will happily use a local super computer, or Grid computing array.