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.

Re:$1 per CPU hour

[carpe_noctem]

Damn, I was just about to host a 1,000 person q3a tourney for a cool 50$. =/

Re:$1 per CPU hour

[Wiz]

I can see where this is going.....

1. Charge $1 per hour of CPU time on your cluster.
2. Lower the speed of your processors.
3. Runtime of tasks increase. So your $1 does less.
4. PROFIT!!!!

Cool, no ???? step! :)

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:$1 per CPU hour

[Uber Banker]

Haha, how cynical! But given they're in competition and not collusion with IBM (for now) plus the 'traditional solutions', perhaps that is second order in their minds.

Where this is going of course, as the article touches on, is the commoditisation of raw computing power, making it a product like iron ore, coal or oil. Genericism will, IMHO, be a really interesting force behind evolution of computational techniques over the next 10 years.

With genericism perhaps there can be no monopoly in provision of computing power, or more specifically for Sun, there is genericism until we get to the buts-and-bolts Solaris and then we get a monopoly in proven scalable OSes and as long as they can hold off Linux snapping at their heels under the reigns of Linux, then they'll have their monopoly and that is step 4; which leaves holding off Linix presumably as step 3, just you forgot to denote it '???'.

Re:$1 per CPU hour

[Anonymous Coward]

All of the software required to be written in Java. End of discussion.

Re:$1 per CPU hour

[AviLazar]

Valve/Steam just host the pointers to the servers - so the barely-reliable is based on whose system you are accessing. It is similar to blizzard - companies pay blizzard to license the software and give them a pointer.

As for the grandparent post - you can host your UT3 tourney - just charge each player $3/hour :)

Can Spamers use it

[Anonymous Coward]

Does that mean spammers don't need the grid of zombie windoze boxes? So sun is competing w/ msft.

Re:Can Spamers use it

[Anonymous Coward]

Spamers don't need it because:

1. Their grid of windows boxes is bigger than all of sun.
2. Their network is Free (and people said Free Software doesn't run on windows).

advert

[sashang]

haha the front page advert made the news

Woo-hoo!

[Saint Aardvark]

Eat my SETI@Home dust!

Beow....wait a minute

[anakin876]

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.

Re:Beow....wait a minute

[I8TheWorm]

Most companies, unless they are pharm or bio, won't really have any use for this. It's the labs that are folding DNA or running weather pattern predicitons that would have use for Sun's service.

Re:Beow....wait a minute

[Anonymous Coward]

Good for movies too. Building a rendering cluster each time you make a movie is expensive.

Re:Beow....wait a minute

[Uber Banker]

Most companies, unless they are pharm or bio, won't really have any use for this.

Financial mining and oil companies will have a HUGE use for this: mining for geology, oil for fluids and financial pricing, financials, obviously, for financial pricing (ranging from neural nets to weather).

So once we've stripped out pharma, bio, oil, mining, financials... there aren't many large company industries left! Plus, I'm really interested how academia will take to this.

Interesting to see the future...

[chris09876]

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.

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.

Doesn't seem effecient

[adamruck]

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.

Re:Doesn't seem effecient

[Decaff]

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.

But if you can solve your problem in an hour on a grid, what is the point of having your own system for the rest of the time?

Re:Doesn't seem effecient

[Roadkills-R-Us]

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^)

Re:Doesn't seem effecient

[ciroknight]

And you answered the reason for such a thing at the end of your post. Sure it's cheaper to rent a server for 150$ a month, but you're only going to get a recent pentium 4, maybe a xeon or a opteron. You could spend a little more and get a much bigger system, but this is around what you'll get, tops.

What if you wanted to do a research project on the fluid mechanics of the jetstream? (completely hypothetical, and just as an example of an operation that could be parallelized for speed). Your little 1-2 processor machine that you'll get for 150$ bucks is now going to take forever to do this, even for a relatively short sample. So, you now have an option of getting a 512 processor machine that can probably do the same amount of work in five to ten minutes, but since you're buying time in CPU hours, you can afford to do 6-12 times the sample space, for just 512 dollars, and can have it done in an hour, verses waiting a couple of months to do the same sample space, which would end up costing you relatively the same in monitary units, but a vast amount of difference in time. And as we know, Time == Money, so by blowing more time, you've actually spent more (especially if you're working for a company, which wants it done yesterday).

Just a thought/example.

"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.

Instructions:

[Anonymous Coward]

1- Insert coin here. $1 for each CPU per hour.
2- Insert DVD containing program in the tray on your right.
3- Please wait...

Talk about irony...

[naer_dinsul]

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?

Odd Currency Exchange

[geomon]

"Why build your own grid when you can use ours for a buck an hour?" asks Sun's COO Jonathan Schwartz."

I feel a little wierd paying for my grid computing with venison.

It must just be me.

Re:Odd Currency Exchange

[wildwood]

Q: What's the difference between beer nuts and deer nuts?

A: Beer nuts are $1.79. Deer nuts are under a buck.

Thank you, I'm here all week.

Another Way

[SpottedKuh]

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 wonder how much to render a Pixar flick...

[PornMaster]

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.

Ya Think??!

[handmedowns]

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.."

It's too expensive.

[sbaker]

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.

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.

If you can't sell it, rent it

[gUmbi]

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

It's funny how old ideas become new again though...Is Jonathon Schwartz/Sun trying to become the new Ross Perot/EDS?

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.

Sun offers energy by the hour

[GillBates0]

Sun offers energy by the hour

The Sun has launched a pay-as-you-go service which will allow customers requiring huge solar power to rent it by the hour.

Solar power costs users $1 (53p) for an hour's worth of light and heating power on land covered by Sun.

So-called fusion reaction is the latest buzz phrase in a solar system which believes that solar energy is as important a commodity as hardware and software.

The Sun likened fusion reactions to the development of electricity.

'Buck an hour'

The system could mature in the same way utilities such as electricity and water have developed, said the Sun.

"Why generate your own power when you can use ours for a buck an hour?" he asked in an address launching Sun's quarterly solar eclipse event in the center of the Solar System.

The star will have to persuade the entire galaxy to adopt a new model but it said it already had interest from planets in the milkyway, andromeda and B53 stellar clusters.

Some of them want to book capacity of more than 5,000 TeraWatts each, Sun said.

Mr Sun ran a demonstration of the service, showing how fusion could be performed on elements.

Hundreds of atoms were fused simultaneously, generating energy for a few seconds each.

Sigh....too much time and an agile mind.

What is THE CPU ?

[nomad63]

by means of $1 per CPU hour, are they referring to a p4 or a sparc processor ? At what speeds ? This can make a huge difference how quickly your CPU intensive problem gets solved.

This is so retro!

[jhobbs]

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

What's with all the stock pictures?

[gotr00t]

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.

Capitalism

[No Such Agency]

Hey, if they have CPU's and want venison, and you have venison and need CPU's, isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work?

Re:Because its Sun...

[CommieOverlord]

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.

One dollar per hour, Jesus.

[alw53]

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

Its not just what the boxes cost

[tallsails]

Our datacenter costs include UPS cost, cooling costs, rack space, operators, 24x7 on call techs, backups, off site backup storage, which multiple the CPU box cost by several factors.

The current big users of this are financial institutions running monte carlo analysis of stock and commodities markets - they use thousands of CPUs at a time, every day.

The other nice feature to this, is you get glass-house data center capability, but can turn it off, which is not as easy with your own lease agreements, etc...

Yet another clueless marketing abuse of Grid

[deadline]

Having a pile of servers does not mean you have a grid. To use the electrical analogy, there are different electrical grids that are not compatible i.e. European and US electrical grids. If you plug into the wrong electrical gird your device does not work. The same is true for computer grids. they are designed to service specific applications. Getting all the details right is hard -- that is what the Globus project is all about.

Now what IBM has been doing is not Grid. You basically rent a machine for a certain amount of time. You actually start with a small test cluster, then when it works, your "image" is then transfered to the real thing.

Grids are designed so that everything you need for your code is on the grid you are using (including data). On-demand is renting cycles.

Re:Because its Sun...

[LurkerXXX]

Only if they are going to make good use of your own system. For others Sun's deal will be very cost effective.

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.

Re:Not a bargain compared to colocation prices

[SunFan]

I'm not clear what the bottom line difference would be between my system and the grid.

Sun could double or triple or whatever your CPU/storage allocation in a moments notice and your bill scales linearly. Their system is completely virtualized.