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."

Comments

Portability - Mobility

[Doc Ruby]

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.