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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.
I wonder how they plan to compete with the distributed/remote computing power provided by all of the unpatched and unprotected Windows based systems in the world that are freely available to anyone with a couple scripts and an internet connection?
This is just the reincarnation of the mainframe era. Everyone (Sun, MicroSoft, et al), want to put us back in the days where the storage/cpu and most importantly the applications themselves are in their "capable" hands.
I'm not even going to enertain the idea of having MY data stored on another (microsoft/sun/etc)server, and paying for the rights to access/modify it.
There is a reason it's called the PC,and not a dumb terminal.
Maybe it can be used to improve OpenOffice load times.
Yah! Now I can get my stats back up. /me cracks knucles
Ouch that hurt... Sun's spirit will always be amongst us.
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If your using 100% of the processor 24/7 for a full year, then no, it's not worth it. However if you need a little here and there, it can be worth it.
With a Microsoft partnership, we now understand how we plan to have the oomph to run Windows Vista when it comes out.
$1 per CPU per hour...the true money-making scheme here is that if you run Linux, they'll charge you the $699 for each processor on behalf of SCO.
So for $50 bucks an hour, you can run a SWING application almost without a performance drop.
With the licensing model, you can run apps with it, but you can't alter any data that passes through without our permission. Want to see the results of your calculations? You'll have to sign an NDA.
Sun Microsystems? Hey weren't they that big dot-com company that wanted programmable toasters? What are they doing these days?
Considering you could buy such a CPU (and the rest of the computer to put it in) for far less than 7k, yes, however you probably actually get 10 CPUs for 6 minutes, rather than 1 for an hour, so the processing is faster than you'd otherwise get. I can't see this being very popular though. The kind of people wanting to run CPU intensive tasks enough to be willing to pay someone for it are likely to be universities and companies that could get their own systems.
Actually, I would imagine this would be more useful for solving larger problems that are run infrequently, where you want do do a distributd task once a month that takes 1000 machine hours and get back a result in 1 hour.
Sun's main problem is they are not able to stick to one strategy for rescuing themselves from the mess. Last year Java Desktop System was all over the press. 100$ per developer..I don't hear of it anymore - now it is 1$ per cpu. They are going to have a hard time getting the trust of enterprises to use a CPU in their servers. Good luck Sun, more importantly Good luck Java
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For the same $400 you could get 100 CPUs for four hours. If your problem divides up reasonably well, then instead of spending your $400 CPU and waiting 16 days, you could instead get your answer in hours.
Maybe you could do it cheaper by buying your own CPUs, but you could be waiting two weeks for your Dells to arrive. How much is it worth to you to get an answer within hours or days versus a few weeks or months of waiting?
--paulj
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
But say you wanted to run the job ten times faster. You'd split it across ten CPUs. Each CPU would perform 1/10th the work, but in parallel, so the job gets done in 1/10th the time. But the total number of CPU-hours you've used remains the same. So you pay the same price but get the job done ten times faster.
If you wanted to do that yourself, you'd have to buy 10 CPUs and once the job was done you'd have a bunch of CPUs you didn't need.
Let's say that you have some number crunching that will take about 7000 CPU hours. Are you going to be happier waiting a year for your desktop to solve the problem or would you pay $7000 to get the answer in one hour?
Sun is betting that there are many people/businesses that fall into the latter category.
More
OK, so for one year of CPU time, maybe it is initially cheaper to buy a whitebox and install linux than it is to use this Sun solution.
However, if you got a linux whitebox to run this, not only would you have to worry about power costs, but also every other detail that comes with making sure your machine is running. What about patches, upgrades, network, bad hardware, runaway processes, general administration, backups, storage, etc? Most of the people here would be able to do the standard stuff that's needed, but I'm sure a business that needs "xyz" computed would gladly pay the 2x price. Not only would it do away with all the minor details, but they'd also have their results back in a significantly shorter amount of time! I'm too lazy to do math right now, but I'd say a year of cpu time could easily be done in less than month. That alone could be _the_ deciding factor and the justification for the expense.
--- "To ignore race and sex is racist and sexist!" -- Jesse Jackson
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...
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If you have a problem that takes 400 CPU hours to run, your answer is either inanely worthless, or mind-bendingly valuable (I needed to throw one of those in there for the SETI group, but I won't say which.)
... I currently work on problems where an hour difference in processing time can make a single data-crunching run cost about an additional $100,000.
Well that or you need to optimize your code, or get a faster machine.
That said, it probably isn't worthwhile to the guy with a $400 problem - more likely they are looking to appeal to the kinds of guys that want to crack 128-bit encrypted data streams in real-time, or run two neural networks against each other in a zillion games of chess in order to teach (evolve) their neural network, or crunch two terabytes of data picked up by an Indy race team over three days at the track. Brute forcing 1024-bit encryption is totally possible, but the data isn't generally valuable a thousand years after you start decrypting it. Throw enough horsepower to decrypt 1024-bit RSA in real-time and you will find yourself rich (or dead.)
Knowing the winning numbers to the lottery thirty minutes after they are announced is pretty worthless.
Knowing the winning numbers to the lottery thirty minutes before they are picked is worth a hundred million dollars.
Amazing difference having the answers an hour earlier makes - I'm not saying that these computers will give you that much of an advantage, but I'm still saying
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Mind you the cost of chip design software is the limiting factor here, not the cost of hardware to run it on
Sun has some fairly substantial profit margins built in at the $1/CPU/hour price.
Consider that if you have a moderately large data set that you need to crunch it's not at all uncommon for it to take 3 hours on a 300 node cluster. That's $1800 if each machine is a dual proc machine.
So suppose Sun has a 300 node cluster, for example, where each machine cost $1800. Ever 3 hours one of the machines is paid for. In other words, a 300 node cluster is paid for in 38 days. Well, the hardware is, anyway.
I really don't know who the main clients would be of this kind of service, however. I'm guessing that if your company can't afford a 10-20 node cluster (fairly cheap) and still needs to do large scale computing, renting CPU cycles from Sun would make sense, though it would very quickly cost more than the 10-20 node cluster would have. So it's really going to benefit customers who need large scale number crunching results more quickly than they can obtain them simply by building a smaller cluster and waiting for the results, or customers whose problems involve data sets that are large enough that they need to be distributed over 100+ machines in order to be solved.
Who has large data sets like that and no cluster access? Not university researchers, not government agencies, and probably not most firms doing significant number crunching.
So I see the niche as firms with large data sets and someone who can write the MPI code, but who lack the willingness or finances to invest in a cluster of their own.
In a year or two when the same service is selling for $0.25 per cpu hour it will be a much more compelling proposition.
Amazing magic tricks
that is why sun is trying to build a system that they can't afford. a super system for the people who need a super system to share. and sun is exactly the people i would trust to build it.
What about 3D rendering? There are lots of people renting time on render farms right now to make deadlines. If I can run PRrenderman on these CPUs, and the price includes storage for my rendered frames, it might be price competitive to buying a lot of processing speed that I'm not going to be using 24/7.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
1. cost for a CPU
2. cost for the box for the CPU
3. cost for data storage
4. cost for monitors
5. cost for cooling for above 1-4
6. cost for power for above 1-5
Now, ask yourself, will the price of power go down if oil will cost $100 (current median bet in the Oil Futures stock simulation using real dollars as per WSJ)?
yes, there are ways to reduce those costs. but not everyone can.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You forgot the most expensive (and often overlooked) part of infrastructure : the infrastructure staff.
Add a few $65,000 / year staffers in there to install / support those $2,500 machines and you are looking at $13,500 per year (every year) per machine. I know, that's what my company bills my department for each server I have on the network.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
What about releasing a grid client so every one could earn some bucks by letting their cpus work for others?
You know, like the spam bots in windows, but getting money!
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Sun wants us to run an app on their powerful grid, but what do software vendors think about us running their single lincense across, say, 100 CPUs?
So now, on top of the $1/CPU/hr, we have to buy a license for each of those CPUs.
Or else this will be very good for open source.
We've gone over this before. The price isn't bad. You don't buy time on this system when you have one CPU's worth of stuff to compute and don't need it for a years time.
You buy time on it when you need a LOT of CPUs worth of stuff done NOW.
Imagine you have some projection software package that you need to run once a quarter for your company. You need the data within a week of the beginning of the quarter. You require 10,000 CPU hours to get the numbers all crunched. It's the only "big-computing" job you have.
On one computer the task would take you a little over a years time (8544 hours in a year). That won't quite be up to the task, remember you need the job done in a week. That's 10,000 CPU hours to fit into 168 hours of real time. You'd neeed 60 processors chugging away for those 168 hours to get it done.
How much is a 60 CPU cluster going to cost you to build? It's not insanely expensive, but it's not cheap. It looks a lot better to you to build that cluster than to spend $40,000 a year though! Right?
Wait. Clusters take up space. A 70 CPU cluster (better add in a few for redundency since this job has to be done in time) is not going to fit in the broom closet. That floor space is going to cost you.
Hmm, those 60 CPUs throw off a lot of heat when they run. Better add some more cooling to the building. Another decent expense.
Damn, look at that electric bill from the extra 70 CPUs and cooling for them. This nickel and dime stuff is starting to add up.
And now for the killer. You've got a new 70-CPU cluster. Your going to need someone to manage it. Cluster work is a bit different from what's what your used to, and your IT staff is already busy with their current workloads. It's time to hire a guy to manage the cluster. BZZZZZZZZZT. That hire alone makes the $40,000 a year for grid CPU time a deal.
Work the numbers yourself. It's not really a bad deal if you only occassionally need massive computing.
reprinted in August 2005 in the 32 & 16 Years Ago column.
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?
http://www.betanews.com/article/Microsoft_Heats_Gr id_Iron_with_Bigtop/1104374194 4 6291,00.asp
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,2180,17
It may be on the back burner at MS for now, but as we've seen many times if they perceive a market they're missing out on they can throw enormous resources at a project to get it to market.
You forgot the convenience factor. You'd have to wait a week, twiddling your thumbs, while that cluster ground away at the data. If there's a problem with the data, you may not find out until the end of the week, at which time your bosses will be pissed because you'll be telling them the projections will be delayed.
With Sun's service, you'll probably get the result within a few hours, not a week. If there's a problem the tests can be re-run with plenty of time before the presentation.
Of course, your bosses may be even more displeased about the extra $10,000 cost of the run than they would've been about another week's delay. Hope you talk fast!
But think about business models where the grid provider sells not only CPU cycles, but also trust.
Scalable web hosting: Your PHP code is replicated on-demand to as many grid server as needed to handle your peak loads. The grid provider guarantees that server-side code and data remains confidential. End of the slashdot effect as we know it.
MMORPG: Small startups can deploy worldwide networks of game servers in no time and compete with the big boys.
The next Google: Anyone with a smarter search algorithm can go online without investing in huge datacenter first.
Rendering farm: Your CG movie is due to premiere next month, and your 10,000-node rendering farm can complete the job in time. Wouldn't you pay extra $$ to anyone who can save the day and guarantee that screenshots won't be leaked to the Net ?
Combine this with a micropayment infrastructure where the grid provider sends bills to end-users on behalf of the service provider. Huge potential.
AC
I don't believe any of them cost $100 for every 20 days runtime! As for 250%, Oh boy! I have a bridge to sell you!
;), and your SLA with yourself is pretty flexible and forgiving ;).
You're not paying for and hence you do not have:
- data centre floor space with:
- heavy duty UPS
- generator backup
- climate control
- security
- redundant networking
- multiply redundant storage
- tape backup silos / HSM
- The 24x7 staff to:
- monitor security
- test the generator weekly
- monitor the backup processes
- monitor and maintain the network
- monitor and maintain the hardware
etc. etc. If you think your costs as "Joe Bloggs the guy who runs a few Linux PCs at home" are comparable to a corporate affair then you're simply kidding yourself, particularly when you're not billing yourself for your own time
A lot of corporates have thought what you thought "Ah sure, it can't be expensive to run a few servers in our own 'data centre'", and they typically either under-estimate the costs, or they end-up with very shoddy server facilities. Then they'll have reliability problems due to:
- servers overheating cause they're stuffed into a cupboard (seen this)
- lack of staff expertise (all too common)
- utilities failures (they couldn't afford the large UPS + diesel generators + cut-over switches + electricians expenses)
- the gradual increasing burden of maintaing installed plant, which if not planned professionally slowly but surely turns into a huge sprawl of unmarked cables, till it gets to point even simple rewiring tasks are a massive (and error-prone) undertaking.
Eventually, to a lot of these types of small corporations, locating in a managed data-centre and letting someone else take care of the details becomes very very attractive. (particularly for coporates whose primary business is *not* computing).
You are almost certainly underestimating the costs.
--paulj
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Not all CPU hours are the same. An hour on a moderately fast SPARC processor is not as valuable as a moderately fast Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron or a PowerPC.
Since Sun is attepting to utilise economies of scale, as this gets more popular, presumably prices would become more and more accessible.
-Tez
Haskell, the static-typed, lazy, polymorphic, programming language.
economics and scalability are not that simple to mix. Your $400 machine simply can't handle the dataset or the array sizes or the threads or much any metric you'd get when you size up any number of huge but very practical programs that businesses sometimes run. To name but one example: the monster linear systems that model supply chain and what-if a huge number of variables so the company can find the right product mix...the list of such programs is bigger than you may be aware.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
And how the fuck are you going to transfer *hundreds of gigabytes* of data required to render a frame over the internet? How are you going to receive the data back? (2MB - 12MB per layer per frame).
Does that thing even have Renderman installed? (at $5k/CPU I highly doubt it). Does it have Shake? Does it have Houdini? Does it have Maya?
Besides that, how the fuck are you going to get approval to send _anything_ out of the studio? You obviously have never worked in the industry.
I'm also skeptical as to whether there is any use for this. What sort of environment do they run it on? Solaris/SPARC? Solaris/x86? Linux? Windows? What sort of software does it have installed? Would it ever be possible to replicate the in-house environment on this "grid"? (you know, with all the custom software, directory structure, environment variables, aliases, etc.) I know for a fact that there is no way we could outsource our rendering to Sun even if we tried.
The whole "CPU-hour" thing is a very nebulous concept. Environments differ wildly from one company to another, so you can never have a universal "CPU grid" in the same sense as you can have an electric grid.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Actually I think this might be very appealing to research groups at universities.
As part of your grant proposal you include a flat cost for computer time rather than costing out hardware purchases. Not only that, but you can also start your project as soon as the money is approved, you don't have to go through all the hoops to buy, ship, house, and administer the hardware.
There's a wonderful technical paper analyzing the value of procrastination. Don't recall the details, but the upshot was that for certain computing problems long enough (on the order of years compuatation time), at some point it's just better to do nothing at all until the price of the hardware drops and the CPU speeds rise enough so that you can actually get the job done sooner than if you started running the job on what you had ASAP.
If you have computing job that will take 4 years on today's processors, and processors will be 4 times faster 2 years from now, better to do nothing for 2 years and then run the job on computers that will complete the job in 1 year, getting you done a year early including a 2 year vacation.
Wish I still had that paper...
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I'm thinking of my own employer, who's got hardware up the wazoo that mostly just sits around heating the building. Take payroll, for instance. They probably run some payroll batch job a couple times a month, then the rest of the time the computer that does payroll is just sitting around. Sure, you could run other stuff on it, but then when it came time to do the payroll everything would run slow and people would be upset.
The way I see it, this is perfect for all kinds of periodic batch-type business applications where you really want to have a dedicated machine but it won't be utilized all the time.
Also, machines that mostly sit around have about the same maintennence requirements as heavily-used hardware. They still need OS patches, security patches, backups, etc. And they need to get modified when the new head of IT decides logs should go in /var/tmp/messages instead of /var/adm/messages or whatever. I know my employer could probably get rid of 2/3 of its data center and a corresponding fraction of the high-priced administrators currently making everything run smoothly.
You could argue companies can do the same thing by balancing existing hardware, i.e. have one box host multiple "bursty" applications so the CPU doesn't have much idle time. But that takes lots of effort to manage, and it doesn't leave you any spare capacity when you need it. This way you don't need any spare capacity, and when your business grows you never have to worry about running out of rack space or lead times for new hardware.
The downside, of course, is you're trusting Sun to have the capacity available when you need it. In a way, it really is like a utility - Sun will be hoping its customers "bursts" will all average out to some managable load. I wonder if it's true.
At 6:18 pm on August 24th, skynet became self-aware.