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."
Sun's Overview
How is this offtopic? It's being advertised all over OSTG. A leaderboard advertisement i saw over an hour ago was this very thing.
Indeed!
Our research group recently bought a small cluster (around 40 processors), and as the project moved forward, it found that finding a good place to put it with sufficient cooling and power infrastructure was quite a bit more costly than originally assumed.
The idea of renting a lot of computing power without bothering with these issues is very attractive. -- Paul
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
I've done some work in the HPC (High Performance Computing) field, and for a lot of the applications in research, you only need that much CPU power once. I did some coding that I had run on NERSC, and I can see the use of this for private companies (NERSC is owned by the Department of Energy).
This is what I've seen of people doing research type work. The researchers will have a smaller cluster always available to then (2 to 16 node setup), that they use for all their initial development of the application. But when they need to run the program for real, doing their full calculation, they would farm it out to some big system like NERSC. The scheduling systems these kinda of systems have tend to do a really good job at scheduling workloads, and the wait tends to be minimal.
I think this is a good idea for companies that don't want to build their own grid. The cost of the computers might not be a lot, but if you have an application that requires a lot of communication between systems, you need a really good interconnect system (such as InfiniBand) cost a lot of money to setup. You could spend as much on a good interconnect system as you do on all your computers, if not more.
Its not what it is, its something else.
And you answered the reason for such a thing at the end of your post. Sure it's cheaper to rent a server for 150$ a month, but you're only going to get a recent pentium 4, maybe a xeon or a opteron. You could spend a little more and get a much bigger system, but this is around what you'll get, tops.
What if you wanted to do a research project on the fluid mechanics of the jetstream? (completely hypothetical, and just as an example of an operation that could be parallelized for speed). Your little 1-2 processor machine that you'll get for 150$ bucks is now going to take forever to do this, even for a relatively short sample. So, you now have an option of getting a 512 processor machine that can probably do the same amount of work in five to ten minutes, but since you're buying time in CPU hours, you can afford to do 6-12 times the sample space, for just 512 dollars, and can have it done in an hour, verses waiting a couple of months to do the same sample space, which would end up costing you relatively the same in monitary units, but a vast amount of difference in time. And as we know, Time == Money, so by blowing more time, you've actually spent more (especially if you're working for a company, which wants it done yesterday).
Just a thought/example.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
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...