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Sun Enters Grid-Computing Rental Market

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the check-out-the-clip-art-scientist dept.

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."

5 of 275 comments (clear)

  1. Beow....wait a minute by anakin876 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  2. I wonder how much to render a Pixar flick... by PornMaster · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  3. What's with all the stock pictures? by gotr00t · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Does anyone notice how on the BBC article, both the pictures on the page have almost nothing to do with the article itself? The picture of a guy in a lab coat taking his glasses off is kind of a stretch, and the other picture, some old IC's, is totally irrelevant, considering the caption is about how sun offers tons of computing power, and virtually no modern microprocessors have the DIP package anymore.

    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.

  4. Re:Doesn't seem effecient by Roadkills-R-Us · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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^)

  5. One dollar per hour, Jesus. by alw53 · · Score: 3, Interesting



    I can remember blowing $200 per minute on the Univac 1108 at Georgia Tech, when my program got into an infinite loop.