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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.
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.
Good for movies too. Building a rendering cluster each time you make a movie is expensive.
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
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).
Actually, I think corporate research would be much more of a market. For one, if you have an academic department doing the kind of research which requires heavy computing, then their need is probably going to be pretty constant, and you'll be better off building your own grid. And the ones who don't need that power on a day-to-day basis are usually picking up the slack on the university grids. Academia has a long and established tradition of collaboration and pooling common resources, from telescopes to particle accelerators.
Corporate research is a better target, where you might, for instance, need big computational resources for a certain project or contract, but not on a day-to-day basis.
The Seventies came back in fashion, why not in computing.
Then those businesses/institutions didn't their research. No, this isn't effective (for cost or other reasons) for all cases, but there are some cases where it will be. You can't blame Sun if customers failed to go with the solution that best suited their needs.
That sounds about right. Scientific time sharing hasn't been a good business model since 1980. If you need heavy compute power, you get your own cluster. If there was a viable business model in this space, hosting companies would be selling this as a service. They already have the right infrastructure.
For a while, it looked like commercial render farms might be a viable business. But today's stats at ResPower read "Running frames: 3, Waiting frames 0", so only 3 of their 500+ computers are active right now.
The "use spare cycles on other people's PCs" model works fine, if you're a spammer or an adware/spyware company. But nobody seems to be paying out money to home users for spare cycles.
Suppose you do some fancy quarterly statistics/forcasting analysis that take 20 hours on that 1,000 CPU cluster( which would have taken you 833 days to run on a single CPU machine). That might be your only major need for intense CPU power.
That's when you want to use these clusters. For the price of $20,000 each quarter you can avoid the cost of a 1000 cpu cluster (which will be several hundred thousand dollars at least), plus building space, maintenance, cooling, power, administration cost, etc, etc, etc. Plus SUN will likely be upgrading their clusters regularly, and that would be an additional cost to you to keep upgrading your own cluster. Sun's deal makes a lot of sense for occasional use high intensity jobs.
If you have enough researchers doing enough things to keep one busy most of the time, then yes, you are right, it would be cost effective to build your own. But there are going to be a lot of places that don't have such a high continual need.