Sun Grid Utility Goes Live for Employees

museumpeace writes "CNET is reporting that Sun Microsystems turned on its Grid computing utility, hosting large ERP applications for its employees to test out the server infrastructure and user acceptance of the Computing-as-metered-utility model. General availability is scheduled for October. The rates? "Sun is offering processing and storage in a pay-as-you-go arrangement of $1 per CPU per hour, delivered via an Internet connection". Sun is still retooling its Thin Client interfaces and support SW. Experts quoted in the article wonder if Sun can make any money this way." Slashdot also covered the original announcement back in February.

Comments

Re:$1/CPU/hour?

[Tango42]

Considering you could buy such a CPU (and the rest of the computer to put it in) for far less than 7k, yes, however you probably actually get 10 CPUs for 6 minutes, rather than 1 for an hour, so the processing is faster than you'd otherwise get. I can't see this being very popular though. The kind of people wanting to run CPU intensive tasks enough to be willing to pay someone for it are likely to be universities and companies that could get their own systems.

Re:$1/CPU/hour?

[TheRaven64]

Our 128 Xeon cluster cost around £100,000 (around $200,000). It has an expected life span of around 3 years, but will not be used 24x7 at maximum capacity. Assuming that it was (and assuming Sun's CPUs are the same speed), the equivalent from Sun would cost $3,363,840. Now even considering that our technician's time keeping the cluster running and up to date probably doubles the initial investment cost over the lifespan, and adding on air conditioning costs, it's still a good five times cheaper to buy our and operate our own system. Now, at 10 an hour, Sun would be the clear winner...

Aggregation of Demand

[IEEEmember]

The whole idea of resource sharing via networks is based on the fundamental concept of aggregation of demand. The expectation is, that given an operational network, relatively small demands from around a large geographic area can be aggregated and thus be satisfied with one or a few specialized centers. By aggregating specialized service production into fewer centers, the required services can be provided at lower costs than would result from provision of the equivalent services by means of a large number of smaller machines. This principle of demand aggregation, to obtain the advantages of scale, applies to hardware, to software, and to operational costs.

From IEEE Computer Society magazine Computer, August 1973
reprinted in August 2005 in the 32 & 16 Years Ago column.

Re:$1/CPU/hour?

[pclminion]

Then follow that logic through: if Sun successfully establishes a market for leased CPU, then the Grid @ Home screensaver will come out offering to pay you some fraction of the proceeds to use your computer's idle cycles -- and presents that capacity to market at a lower cost than Sun's $1/hr.

You assume that all parallel jobs have a negligible communication overhead. Many parallel algorithms are communication bound, and these simply won't work when distributed across the Internet. Are you seriously comparing a rag tag assembly of 1000 random PCs tied together across the Internet, to a 1000 node hypercube with dedicated gigabit interconnects?

Re:Everything Old is New Again

[oldmanmtn]

There is a reason it's called the PC,and not a dumb terminal.

There are no dumb terminals - only dumb users.

This isn't targeted at PC users. This is for (for example) the hedge fund that needs 50 machines for 8 hours, once a week, to run a complex model. This gives them the power they need for a fraction of the price of the raw hardware, and they don't have to pay anybody to maintain it.

I've had projects where I really wanted 1000 CPUs for a week, just so I could do scalability testing. There's no way we could afford $1,000,000 to buy 1000 machines just for that one test, but we could probably have swung $50,000 to get them for five 10 hour days or ten 5 hour days.