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

Re:$1 per CPU hour

[macklin01]

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

Re:It's too expensive.

[Necroman]

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.