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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.
Eat my SETI@Home dust!
Carousel is a lie!
"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.
"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.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
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
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.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
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.
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.
Its not what it is, its something else.
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.