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."

Comments

Selling off CPU time...

[ZzzzSleep]

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 Or am I out of date and they have already done this?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

POVRay

[AKAImBatman]

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?

FYI: Non USians need not apply.

[Angostura]

We're not having you modelling your nukes on our servers thankyouverymuch.

Re:FYI: Non USians need not apply.

[MaineCoon]

US citizens, however, are free to model nuclear weapons to their hearts' desire. Until Homeland Security shows up.

A bug could be costly

[DrDitto]

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!

Obligatory

[PitaBred]

Imagine a beowulf cluster of... oh, forget it

Greetings Professor Falken...

[boldtbanan]

I wonder if I can play games on Sun's system. Perhaps a nice game of chess? Or maybe Global Thermonuclear War?

Sun Grid HW / SW specs

[DAldredge]

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

Re:Isnt this really expensive?

[Kadin2048]

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.

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 ... except that it has something like 12,000 of them.

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.