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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."
How long will it be until botnet operators start up a similar service? Or am I out of date and they have already done this? Anyway kudos to Sun for offering this service.
ZzzzSleep
Emerald Astrology
I wonder how long it would take for someone to port the POVRay engine to Sun's grid? At $1 per CPU/hour, this could be a boon for amatuer 3D graphics designers and the Internet Ray Tracing competitors. Use low res renders during testing, then pay Sun $25 to get your high quality result back in 20 minutes rather than the next day. Could be a lot of fun. :-)
Can anyone think of other good uses for the average (or not so average) home user? Perhaps new image compression formats that rely on Sun's Grid to get the best compression/quality tradeoffs through brute-force power?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
We're not having you modelling your nukes on our servers thankyouverymuch.
The ability to but powerful computing time is a cool idea that has been featured in several sci-fi novels. However the article fails to mention exactly how powerful these Sun CPUs are. How much bang do you get for your buck? They also fail to mention how hard it will be to write code for this platform. Can I simply send them some standard C source, or will I have to code using some special extensions that will make my code totally unportable and thus lock me into buying more and more time from them?
Philosophy.
I use grid computing for simulations. If I were charged for CPU-hours, you can bet I would be more careful about debugging. I've wasted thousands of CPU hours because of bugs, or sloppy configuration, in my simulator generating incorrect results. One bug was an infinite loop that resulted in 100 CPUs spinning for a week before I noticed!
Imagine a beowulf cluster of... oh, forget it
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Click here to kick off a job on Sun's Compute Grid consisting of AMD Opteron-based Sun Hardware.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I wonder if I can play games on Sun's system. Perhaps a nice game of chess? Or maybe Global Thermonuclear War?
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
Wow, $1/CPU/hr. Same price as an MP3 off of iTunes, so it must be worthwhile, right?
OK, we are only about 3.5 months into the year of 2006, and lets look at some real data:
I run a few small to medium sized HPC clusters, and on one of them, here are the CPU hours used during 2006 -- 163,000+ this is on less than $500k of hardware that is years old. That would cost $163k just in computing time, not to include time to port applications, debug, etc.
Sun needs to be run by engineers and visionaries again, not by marketers. $1/CPU/hr is not going to do much better on those falling stock prices than selling $200 Linux PCs in Wal-Mart.
where do I submit my deck of fortran punch-cards and where do I pickup the printout?
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
If I could compile mencode/mplayer for Solaris I could upload my dvd isos and get sun to encode these for me in H264 for my HTPC.
I anticipate that each film would cost me ~$2. Not bad. Is that a safe bet? ANybody know what disk space they give for "personal files".
Now to explain to my ISP that I am not participating in illegal file sharing with +100GB per month of traffic is not going to be easy..
More seriously, I could use this to run some of my Monte-Carlo simulators..
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
That's 2.2 GHz per processor, times about a thousand processors or so. That's how modern supercomputers work. The processing nodes themselves are somewhat unimpressive, but they're built so that they scale really well, and deal with problems that are designed so as to be broken up into lots of little parts and solved simultaneously. So if you used all the processors on the machine for an hour, your bill (theoretically) would be $1,000.
... except that it has something like 12,000 of them.
The most powerful computer in the world right now, ASC Purple (it does nuclear weapons simulations for the USG), has 1.5 GHz RISC processors. Not exactly impressive, by today's standards
It's the infrastructure to get that many processors (and their associated dangly bits) talking to each other and working on the same problem efficiently that's expensive and nontrivial.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Like seti or folding@home except instead of donating your spare cpu cycles for one particular task you'd be making them available for anyone to rent?
The price per hour per cpu could be based on demand and could be distributed to all the contributers. Imagine all the processing power out there not being used. Especially the gpus on people's video cards while they're not playing games.
bite my glorious golden ass.
anyone have any idea how much it would cost me to buy the # one spot on boinc?
p hp?pr=bo&st=0&to=100
Take down NEZ for one day-- that would be sweet
http://www.boincstats.com/stats/boinc_user_stats.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random