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IBM Provides Access to Blue Gene On Demand
neutron_p writes "IBM's world renowned Blue Gene supercomputing system, the most powerful supercomputer, is now available at new Deep Computing Capacity on Demand Center in Rochester, MN. The new Center will allow customers and partners, for the first time ever, to remotely access the Blue Gene system through a highly secure and dedicated Virtual Private Network and pay only for the amount of capacity reserved. Deep Computing Capacity on Demand will service new commercial markets, such as drug discovery and product design, simulation and animation, financial and weather modeling and also a number of customers in market segments that have traditionally not been able to effectively access a supercomputer at a price within their budgets.
The system enables customers to obtain a peak performance of 5.7 teraflops."
What's 5.7 teraflops in more familiar units? Like SETI@home workunits/day? By my calculations that's 1.5 workunits every second. Give or take. By comparison the entire SETI@home network is currently running at 67 teraflops.
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
Is it really news? They've had commercials running on TV for this for weeks, if not months. If they had commercials back then, that decision and announcement would've been done before. Why is this news now?
Not that it's not a cool idea...
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Did CowboyNeal just take over /. ?? 8 out of the 10 postings are his!!!
-ItsME
This is the same computing model as was used in large "computing centers" - such as those in universities - back in the 1950s-1970s:
...). Just buy the size of pipe you need to keep from being bottlenecked at peak load and leave it mostly idle. (You'd end up doing that by proxy anyhow - eliminate the middleman.) Client-server computing models moved institutions to a similar model for crunch and storage. General-user timesharing services gave way to networking services with unmetered shell accounts, which gave way to pure networking services, as the cheapening of computation evolved the personal terminal from a special purpose keyboard/display/comm box, first to terminal emulation on a dumb computer, then to one application on a progressively more powerful (though still small and cheap) computer functioning as a full-blown network node.
The machine you need is too expensive to buy yourself and then leave sitting around idle most of the time (like a pencil sharpener). So an institution buys and sets one up, and you rent chunks of its time. If the demand goes up the institution gets more rent and can buy upgrades.
You get a machine fast enough to do your too-big-for-humans computing task in a short time (so YOU don't spend most of your time waiting to do YOUR next piece of work, like a pencil sharpener). You only pay for the amount you use.
Billing by CPU seconds, I/O volume, memory usage (fast and files), etc.
In the '50s you took your work to the machine, by the '60s remote terminals were becoming available, by the '70s packet-switching networks were making machines available across continents.
And also by about the '70s you were starting to see both comm and crunch becomming so cheap that, for ordinary jobs, accounting by the slice no longer made economic sense. Better use of money scattering (cheap) computers around and making them wait than only having a few and making (expensive) people wait.
Paying for comm by usage metering never caught on (too bursty, wastes human attention worrying about the effect on the bill,
But there are still REALLY BIG jobs were the economics of a shared utility make perfect sense. IBM was once a primary provider of machines to such utilities within educational and business institutions. Now it's largely a business service provider. It seems approprate they should recognize the opportunity and use it as a way to make a profit by filling a gap at the high end of the computing market.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
And for fuck sake can we stop building this things to predict the weather [...]
They're not building it "to predict weather". They're building it to do really large computation jobs.
Predicting weather is just one canonical example of a really hard and really useful thing to do that can be done well by throwing enough crunch at it.
Some others are fluid/aerodynamic modeling, chemical geometry modeling (especially protein folding and drug/receptor interactions), graphics rendering, mechanical structure and motion simulation, and subatomic particle interactions.
You'll notice that, in the blurb, they mentioned commercial uses of all of those except for the nuclear engineering applications.
Given that applied nuclear physics is heavily regulated worldwide, legal users are likely to be funded well enough to have their own machines, and governments get worried about such info traveling on open networks, IBM probably doesn't see much market for that service - or at least not much that they can sell into. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Jeez, who's moderating these days...and what do they think redundant means?
Yeah, when I posted someone else had already posted that the Blue Gene website had been slashdotted. But if they read the rest of my post they'd of realized that wasn't the main idea in my post. My immediate thought when I saw that it was slashdotted was that they hadn't expected a high level of interest from the general public. They thought this would be pretty esoteric and limited to a few researchers who needed lots of processing power on an ongoing basis. In fact, if you're passing out 70 teraflops in 5.7 teraflop chunks you're only looking at around 12 customers. Sure some folks won't use a full chuck, but it still won't be more than maybe 50 customers.
That reminded me of a feasibity analysis done at IBM in the late 1940s when IBM was developing their first computer. They stated that the worldwide demand for the machine was expected to be around four machines.
Hence my post. And a sad day for slashdot when I have to explain an allusion to a very famous moment in computing history!