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

$1 per CPU hour

[Bryan Ischo]

Note that the cost is $1 per CPU hour. This means that if your application uses 1,000 CPUs, it will cost you $1,000 per hour. Since the target applications are large problems that are not easy to solve without huge CPU resources, the cost for most applications will be quite a lot.

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.

"Why build one?"

[dilvish_the_damned]

"Why build your own grid when you can use ours for a buck an hour?"
So I can charge 90 cents an hour.

Re:Interesting to see the future...

[k98sven]

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.

This is so retro!

[jhobbs]

The Seventies came back in fashion, why not in computing.

Re:If you can't sell it, rent it

[Animats]

So Sun's finally found a use for all of their spare inventory.

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.