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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."
imagine a beowulf cluster of these.....oh wait it is already a grid. hmmm. Actually this could be really cool. I wonder how many companies will want to use it though. I think the security concerns (handing Sun your information, the possibility of someone else recovering the information at a later date and so on) may scare some companies off.
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). If you had a big problem that you spent a lot of time preparing, and then needed a bunch of processing power, this seems like the ideal solution. It certainly is cheaper than building your own giant cluster... but as the first poster pointed out, you pay per CPU per hour, not just per hour.
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
As I loaded Slashdot, there was an ad at the top for...
you guessed it...
The Sun Grid, available for $1/cpu-hr...
Are you sure Slashdot isn't selling advertising space disguised as news items?
From TFA:
:)
Mr Schwartz ran a demonstration of the service, showing how data could be processed in a protein folding experiment.
Of course, if your experiment is cool enough and academia-related, there are always other ways to get computing power. A similar chemistry experiment was performed using grid-computing in Canada, utilizing computing power from universities all across the country. http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~ciss/
Now, granted this wouldn't be applicable to a lot of businesses, which is Sun's target audience. But the CISS project has a cooler name
I'd be very interested in knowing how much it would be to render something like a Pixar all-CGI movie on their grid.
For all those who keep asking about cost-effectiveness... don't forget that when you rent from a utility grid, you don't have to worry about obsolescence - it's someone else's problems. You're not throwing out a bunch of P3s because P4s are available and better price/performance when the second project comes along. Renting CPU time is an operating expense. Running your own compute grid is both an operating and a capital expense.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
It's so true. My first computer was a Commodore 64. Microsoft all the way.
...there will probably be several research businesses and institutions that will be tricked into thinking that they need to use this pay by the hour grid instead of making their own which would be more cost effective.
Considering these ads have only been on slashdot all day long..
I love how a good deal of the slashdot community are supporters of open software and standards.. and yet every day that I read a story on slashdot, about how so and so country / state / organization is implementing foss, right SMACK in the middle of the page is an add from MS on the "Facts" about TCO for Windows vs Linux.. or "Facts" about Performance..
Should be "News for Nerds, Irony that matters.."
The road between democracy and tyranny is paved with secrecy in the name of security.
I think that BBC should stop using stock images if they don't actually have images that pretain to the story. I mean, this isn't some high school jornalism class.
This means having a custom system, and custom code, custom network setup, etc, for your problem.
Not true at all. Supercomputers have been used like the Sun Grid will be used for years. Theyve simply never been quite this cheap.
Even with custom software, you can develop it on a much smaller grid (two computers), develop your data set, then copy it all to Sun's grid and run it with the real data. Again, this has been done for decades with old style supercomputers.
I recall developing a FORTRAN program on my university's Cyber (early 1980s) on my personal account (we got a certain amount per quarter to do whatever we wanted with), then running it with the full data set on an IBM mainframe through a timesharing company for my customer. This paid for a quarter or two of schooling. 8^)
Now we need a Linus Torvalds version 2.0 to build a free open-source P2P Beowulf cluster over the Internet.
Imagine playing Doom 3 on a P-II, with the graphics being rendered by an Athlon64 somewhere in the Internet.
Now that many computers are connected to the Internet with fast DSL connections, it would be very beneficial for all if someone could start such a project.
The basic software already exists and it is in the public domain: MPI.
I explain this idea in more detail on my blog.
I can remember blowing $200 per minute on the Univac 1108 at Georgia Tech, when my program got into an infinite loop.
The world has been heading this way for quite some time now.
VNC has single-handedly caused a huge come-back in remote computing. Projects like the LTSP and Sun's thin-terminals have helped as well. But none of those things ever seemed a candidate to replace a computer on your desk, because of performance, and price of a not-so-thin client on every desk.
What I believe will really make a huge dent is fourhead Unix systems. On a dirt-cheap PC ($200) you can attach four sets of keyboards/mice and 4 monitors, and have everyone working on it simultaneously. You don't need $100-$400 thin clients for everyone, and you don't need a full-fledged computer to act as an X server/VNC client. The only additional expense over an individual computer, is the videocards and keyboards/mice.
The thing keeping mainframes down right now, is the lack of a graphical equivalent of RS-232. If Unix systems could provide a display over Firewire/USB2, then a single mainframe could power dozens and dozens of dirt-cheap graphical terminals. Unfortunately, nobody has come forward and set any sort of a standard, and shared Ethernet really isn't up to the task.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant