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Sun Grid Compute Utility
jbltgz writes "The Register is reporting that the long awaited Sun Grid Compute Utility has been opened to the public. Now you can run your CPU intensive jobs on a grid of AMD Opteron-based Sun Hardware for $1 per CPU per hour for a fraction of cost, in a fraction of the time."
Casual Sun observers will be scratching their heads right about now, believing that Sun had already announced such a service a long time ago. That's correct.
rtfa kthnx
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
However the article fails to mention exactly how powerful these Sun CPUs are. How much bang do you get for your buck?
Sun claims that they are "dual-core Sun Fire, Opertron servers". That means that they are likely to be something like the V20z which range from 2.0 GHz to 2.2 GHz. It would be nice if they were a bit more specific (e.g. how do you know they'll upgrade the grid in the future?), but their FAQ makes it sound like they're relying on Solaris CPU stats to charge you. OS stats like that are usually based on time slices rather than actual computational power, thus making a "standardized" CPU/hour difficult to create.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
From their FAQ:
Q:
What are the components of the Sun Grid Compute Utility?
A:
The Sun Grid Compute Utility service consists of the following parts:
* Sun Fire dual processor Opteron-based servers with 4GB/RAM per CPU
* Solaris 10 (x64)
* Solaris 10 OS;
* Sun N1 Grid Engine 6 software;
* Grid Network Infrastructure of 1Gb switched Data Network and 100 Mb dedicated management network;
* Web-based access portal; and
* Internet-only access to upload data and applications (no physical access to location);
* Storage allocation of up to 10 GB per user account.
http://www.sun.com/service/sungrid/faq.xml
Actually someone from SGI ported POV Ray to MPI about 4 years ago:
p ovray/pvmpov.html
http://www.verrall.demon.co.uk/mpipov/
There is also a PVM version as well.
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/
For one of my graduate classes I am MPI enabling the latest povray source based on Leon Verrall, Andreas Dilger, & Brad Klines previous work mentioned above.
Supercomputers aren't about single ultra-powerful CPU:s. A supercomputer consists of lots of CPU:s, possibly thousands, working together. One Opteron 2.2GHz isn't a supercomputer, but a thousand such CPU:s certainly are, if made to work in parallel. Obviously this requires pretty advanced hardware to manage the interconnects and such, in addition to software specifically written for such systems, but that's why everyone doesn't has a supercomputer in his home, even though one can be built using mostly "off-the-shelf" PC hardware.
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
Why is this false accusation modded up?
Read the FAQ.
- The $1/CPU-hour is the only charge.
- 10GB of disk storage is available per account.
- 4GB of RAM is installed per AMD64 CPU.
- No print services are for sale.
Also,
- No upload/download fees.
- MPI is used for distributed jobs. Compile with gcc or the now free Sun compilers.
- Grants to schools are available.
- Developers can get 100 free hours.
Any code that can be compiled and tested on Solaris 10 can be run on the grid. However, to get the benefit of parallel execution (meaning running parts of a job on multiple processors at the same time), which is really the main benefit of running on a grid like this, you must either write multi-threaded code, or you must use the MPI library, which is pretty much the standard these days for scientific and parallel computing.
From their FAQ:
Q: What parallel environments (pvm, mpi, etc.) are available for use on the Sun Grid Utility Services?
A: MPICH v1.2.6, an open implementation of the "Message Passing Interface" is the only parallel environment currently supported on the Sun Grid. MPICH is configured to leverage IP-based networking in our configuration, and is available on Sun Grid as an included resource for you to use without additional charge.
If you're familiar with MPI, this should keep you pretty portable. They recommend you test with Solaris 10/x86_64 and gcc3 or Studio 10.
The quota is 10 GB per account. Each CPU has 4GB of associated RAM. Is that enough space to encode a DVD?
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
From the FAQ:
18. Q:
What are the basic minimum technical requirements to run an application on the Sun Grid Compute Utility?
A:
The following requirements must be met:
Application must run on Solaris 10 (x64).
User must own the application or have proper legal licenses to run applications on the Sun Grid Compute Utility.
Applications must be scripted to work with N1 Grid Engine software.
Application must be self-contained, with no dependencies on external libraries or data sets
Application and data sets total size must be under 10GB.
The user must upload application and data to the Sun Grid over the Internet via portal the Internet Portal at http://www.network.com/
You can run unmodified Linux binaries on Solaris 10 thanks to Janus.
Sun's JDK has 64-bit support for both sparc(v9) and amd64. Just run with the '-d64' flag.