Supercomputer As a Service

gubm writes "Nearly one and a half years after making a stunning entry into the global supercomputer list with Eka, ranked as the fourth-fastest supercomputer in the world, Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a Tata Sons' subsidiary, has succeeded in creating a new market for supercomputers — that of offering supercomputing power on rent to enterprises in India. For now, for want of a better word, let us call it 'Supercomputer as a Service.'"

Comments

Or

[rackserverdeals]

Or, we could call it what everyone else is calling it. Grid computing or sometimes cloud computing.

Re:Or

[Samschnooks]

Or, we could call it what everyone else is calling it. Grid computing or sometimes cloud computing.

Or, we just call it what the old timers originally called it: time sharing.

It fits. Just because it's over the internet as opposed to dedicated lines, I don't see why we need new terminology for basically the same thing.

Re:Or

[Timothy Brownawell]

Or, we could call it what everyone else is calling it. Grid computing or sometimes cloud computing.

I think the idea with those is that you have lots of "normal" computers on a "normal" network, whereas here you have one big computer. There should be different ratios of disk space to compute power, and CPU power to interconnect speeds and probably available RAM.

Re:Or

[rackserverdeals]

Do they pay you for your sig, and do you get more if you first post?

Does who pay me for my sig? That's one of my side projects I'm working on. Not done yet.

Re:Or

[palegray.net]

It isn't that we need new terminology, it's that (1) the masses are poorly educated on this topic with respect to history, and eat up media buzzwords, and (2) corporations exploit (1) to make it seem as though they're doing something much more impressive than they actually are.

Not to be harsh or anything, but having all the computing power in the world isn't going to help Indian enterprises when their staff can't be bothered to speak English well enough to deal with the project teams they're trying to sell their services to.

Re:Or

[Abreu]

Yeah, but for a lot of people, the term "timesharing" involves sunny resorts, pina coladas and elderly couples doing the rumba...

Re:Or

[dzfoo]

In their defence, most Indian staff speaks very good English. It's just hard to understand through the very thick accent.

      -dZ.

Re:Or

[dzfoo]

That's true mostly for data centers in Florida.

        -dZ.

Re:Or

[ducomputergeek]

really? I thought we called it timeshare.

Re:Or

[palegray.net]

In my experience, I've met several Indian I.T. staffers who spoke flawless English, although you're right that sometimes the accent got in the way a bit. Unfortunately, I've dealt with far more who were completely unintelligible, and for whom writing comprehensible documentation that would pass a second grade English class is an impossible feat. That second point is more important to me than spoken dialogue.

It's always been my biggest issue with outsourcing: I don't want to work with people who can't communicate well with others on my team. Nothing against the developers, but they're going to have to change if they want to continue to compete.

Re:Or

[Have Brain Will Rent]

Not to be harsh or anything, but having all the computing power in the world isn't going to help Indian enterprises when their staff can't be bothered to speak English well enough to deal with the project teams they're trying to sell their services to.

I wonder, is it possible that they have projects other than providing outsourcing to other nations?

I agree with you on (1) and (2) though.

Re:Or

[palegray.net]

I would certainly hope they have good research projects that don't depend on outsourcing man-hours to other nations. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case with the vast majority of Indian I.T. shops. The bulk of them seem to be hell-bent on cranking out as many lines of PHP per diem as humanly possible.

Re:Or

[2names]

"doing the rumba"? I sincerely hope you are talking about the dance and haven't just misspelled "roomba"...

Re:Or

[Red Flayer]

It's always been my biggest issue with outsourcing: I don't want to work with people who can't communicate well with others on my team. Nothing against the developers, but they're going to have to change if they want to continue to compete.

You get what you pay for. If you're looking for cut-rate development, you're going to get developers missing at least one part of the puzzle (communication, knowledge, experience).

There are plenty of Indian developers who have the whole skill-set... but they cost a lot more than your basic Indian developer. Often you're looking at $60 an hour (gross) for these developers, which kind of defeats the point of going offshore.

Re:Or

[Jurily]

Unfortunately, I've dealt with far more who were completely unintelligible, and for whom writing comprehensible documentation that would pass a second grade English class is an impossible feat.

Oh, so you're in the UK?

Re:Or

[triceice]

Mexicans that work at drive-thru's that can't speak good english and get you order wrong. Just because you don't understand their accent when they actually have learned more than one language doesn't mean anything

Re:Or

[palegray.net]

US, actually. From what I understand it's worse in the UK. Perhaps all this new supercomputing power can be devoted to creating a Trek-esque universal translator.

Re:Or

[palegray.net]

Just because you don't understand their accent when they actually have learned more than one language doesn't mean anything

The inability to write documentation and participate in requirements discussions means everything. I don't care how many languages a person "sort of" speaks; if he can't write in fluent English, I don't want to work with him on projects where that's supposed to be a requirement. You don't see me running around trying to work with overseas firms where I don't speak the language.

As I said in reply to another poster, I'm hoping they devote a healthy chunk of that new supercomputing power to developing a universal translator.

Re:Or

[Jurily]

Perhaps all this new supercomputing power can be devoted to creating a Trek-esque universal translator.

A telepathic fish is a much feasible idea. Remember, your translator has to decode Busta Rhymes too.

Re:Or

[Have Brain Will Rent]

Somehow I doubt that they would be the clients for supercomputer time.

Re:Or

[Hurricane78]

I sincerely hope, he did not mean the horizontal kind of "rumba", or the oral "roomba". Ewwwww...

Re:Or

[Hurricane78]

Then learn their language!

How is it, that this never comes into the mind of your kind of people?

Re:Or

[palegray.net]

If the relationship were reversed, I certainly would :). I'd make sure I was fluent prior to attempting to work in their culture, however.

Re:Or

[Matt Perry]

I don't see why we need new terminology for basically the same thing.

Something has to be different so they can patent it.

Re:Or

[lucifer_666]

I'm going to put forward Cycles on Tap (CoT). I could type a long winded arguement for this term, but I figure if you like it, you'll use it.

Re:Or

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems the mods agree with your sarcasm.

Um...

[FrameRotBlues]

Isn't this how it was done back in the day, with supercomputer time "leased" to companies who needed it?

My uncle used to work for Minnesota Supercomputer Center and that's how he explained it to me; seemed pretty simple to my 12-year-old mind back then.

Re:Um...

[A. B3ttik]

That's what we do at VT.

Basically anyone, professor or student, commercial or non-profit, willing to fill out a sheet of paper can get Supercomputer Time. The damn thing is so fast that there's really nothing for it to do. It accomplishes every task very quickly, and ends up sitting around doing nothing half the time.

I guess the difference is that people have to go to the facility to use it... they can't utilize it through a Web Service.

Re:Um...

[Anonymous Coward]

but cloud computing sounds so much sexier and companies love it that their customers will have a very hard time leaving

Re:Um...

[Anonymous Coward]

Same thing we do at Fermilab. You apply for an account if you're an employee, scientist, or visiting student, and you get to submit a job to one of our several clusters comprised of thousands of nodes. On the other hand, you can submit jobs to the clusters from anywhere in the world if your institution has been granted access.

Re:Um...

[Warlord88]

I think its the only supercomputer in India. Hence the hype. I too think its natural for a supercomputer to give computing power on lease to others.

Re:Um...

[hitmark]

or how about having one or more companies sponsor a university computer lab with a new warehouse sized toy, in exchange for access to it after hours?

Re:Um...

[Hurricane78]

Oh, I'd knew a process that might fill up those resources.
But you will train it to not kill us all, okay?

Re:Um...

[Anonymous Coward]

and ends up sitting around doing nothing half the time.

Install Folding@Home? ;)

Re:Um...

[FMZ]

Just out of curiosity, can regular old outsiders book time on it, and is there an approval process for what task you wish to run on it? I'll bet it could process the hell out of some rainbow tables.

Re:Um...

[Anonymous Coward]

Get some info before you comment.
If, anything, India has too much computing power and not enough things to do with them. India has been developing and building supercomputers since the late 80s while they are not as cutting edge as the ones in the US, there are at least a couple in the top 500.
The thing is that CRL developed the supercomputer with the express intention of selling computer time.

In Short:

[KefkaZ]

Rent-A-Hal. "I'm sorry Dave, I've been repo'd"

Nothing new to see here

[TheCycoONE]

The idea is very old, and contrary to the article there are plenty of people offering similar services: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Rent-Your-Own-Supercomputer-for-2-77-per-Hour-82166.shtml, http://www.hoise.com/primeur/00/articles/weekly/AE-PR-04-00-20.html, http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/4590/2/, etc.

Is their offering cheaper? Unfortunately the article didn't tell us.

Re:Nothing new to see here

[aerosmith1]

yes, you are right -- when you say nothing new when compared to the world. But new, when you look at it in the Indian context. So, definitely worth taking a look at!

but!

[Anonymous Coward]

does it run windows 7?

Re:but!

[Anonymous Coward]

no. it runs 8. (barely.)

Re:but!

[dzfoo]

Who cares! The real question is: Will it blend?

      -dZ.

Re:but!

[Anonymous Coward]

can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these things...???

this overused meme brought to you by ROFLcopter enterprises.

In all seriousness

[areusche]

Isn't this what the Storm botnet and the conflicker botnet are doing already? Say instead of storm doing something useful like fold proteins, find ET, or pull us out of this financial mess couldn't a person with a lot of money use the botnets for a useful purpose instead of spam or a denial of service attack?

Re:In all seriousness

[interkin3tic]

Ideally these guys renting the supercomputer are more trustworthy than the guys operating the botnets. Not a legal expert, so I'm honestly asking: if you give storm your money and they don't give you the services you pay for, what recourse do you have? Even if they were to, say, figure out the protein structure of your favorite protein, would they then just sell it to the highest bidder after you paid for it?

Could be amusing, Pfizer pays Storm a million dollars to determine the structure of a receptor important for cancer, the structure is determined and posted to 4chan...

I'd also wonder about the legal implications of giving NIH money or private investment money to whoever is operating Storm. Don't know if NIH themselves would know what the heck a botnet is, so maybe it's not currently against NIH funding rules, but I'd bet it would raise a few eyebrows.

Re:In all seriousness

[johanatan]

Even if the results were leaked, could any competitor afford to trust it? They would most likely have to carry out the same expensive, long-running calculation to validate the results (and I doubt they could afford to do so with every random 'discovery' leaked to the net).

Re:In all seriousness

[vlm]

Not a legal expert, so I'm honestly asking: if you give storm your money and they don't give you the services you pay for, what recourse do you have?

Don't buy their services in the future? No different than my legal recourse against any giant multinational corporation, that is, none other than don't shop there again.

Note that organized crime tends toward providing services that require repeat business. Consider their offering prostitution instead of mail order brides, or addictive drugs instead of prescription antibiotics. Even "one time scams" are actually run multiple times. So this is not exactly a new business arrangement for crooks. Isolated little trades between folks that never interact again only happen in movies and RS GTA games.

The way to run that deal, is here's 10% of the money, you get more money after you process 10% of the data, repeat nine times.

To get around the funding rules, well, that is pretty much the definition of a money laundering shell company. Regarding the original article, how does the original author know this is not the case, unless he went on site and physically touched working hardware, preferably with witnesses, etc? Maybe those guys actually wrote the ....

Finally the thing I never understood about "supercomputer as a service", despite hearing about it for literally decades, is "everyone knows" that a supercomputer is merely a way to turn a compute bounded problem into an IO bounded problem. And nothing has worse IO bandwidth and latency than an outsourced service. Its great for problems that don't require any data, but what are those problems? Does the tiny little part of the solution space where it makes sense, generate enough profits to keep "supercomputer as a service" in business? My guess is, no, not long term.

Re:In all seriousness

[dkf]

Isn't this what the Storm botnet and the conflicker botnet are doing already?

Not really. The supercomputers and high-end clusters used for this sort of service have much better (i.e., lower) inter-node latency than any botnet could ever hope to achieve, and there's a lot of problems out there that need that (only a minority parallelize as well as a typical BOINC task or botnet DDoS attack).

Re:In all seriousness

[interkin3tic]

For that matter, I'm not sure I would trust the results from the botnet even if I was the one who ordered it. The odds that they're going to fake say a protein structure that was good enough to fool the researcher who ordered it is fairly low in most scenarios I could think up, but they're not so low that I would risk ruining my academic career on it. If I were to use their services, publish the protein structure, and it were revealed to be false by other researchers, "It was the guys operating the botnet, not sure exactly who they are, but they seem to be based out of Russia" isn't going to erase the black stain, I'd still be working at McDonalds in a few months.

Re:In all seriousness

[johanatan]

Well, in that case, you could build some sort of verification into the software you are running (maybe logging or maybe some form of 'data signing' a la 'code signing').

So, not only do you get 'the result is X' back from the botnet, but you get 'the result is X and here are the repro steps we executed to get it' or 'the result is hash(X) where hash is known only to you'.

Not only not new - it never went away

[Brett Buck]

Its not only nothing new, we never stopped renting high-performance computing time. In some cases, it's ancient supercomputers that aren't all that super any more, but that the applications are so large and difficult to port to other machines, we just kept using them.

      Brett

Everything old is new again

[Aloisius]

Supercomputing as a service is nearly as old as computers are. Granted they were called mainframes.

Frankly I'm amused at how we seem to be regressing 30 years. I expect any day to see dumb terminals and a prognostication that soon the world will need only a few [cloud] computers.

Re:Everything old is new again

[meatmanek]

As some folks have already commented, we're not regressing 30 years, any more than using an internal combustion engine (which has been around for about a century) is a regression. We're just using a technology we've been using all along. This is _not news_.

Re:Everything old is new again

[Todd Knarr]

We already have. Imagine an endpoint with a simple engine in it for rendering forms. The application can upload a program in a forms description language to the endpoint describing what fields the form has, where they should be displayed on the screen, what types of data each field can contain and some simple rules for validing the field contents. The endpoint then displays the form and lets the user edit fields, applying the validation rules as each field is filled in or changed. When the user's done, they hit a button that sends the form's contents back to the application for validation and processing.

Web browser? No, IBM 3270-family workstation.

Re:Everything old is new again

[Anonymous Coward]

They aren't called dumb terminals ... they are thin clients!

Re:Everything old is new again

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're looking for a dumb terminal, you should try out this web thing they have out now. Amazingly the local terminal does mostly nothing and all the real work is being done on the back end at the server/mainframe.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

What?

[jDeepbeep]

No Beowulf cluster comments yet? I am shocked.

Re:Can it run Crysis?

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't what games are made for.

So no, even supercomputers can't handle Crysis.

this will never sell...

[nimbius]

we forgot to call it a cloud, and put it in a grid configuration after we service oriented it
to leverage our core concepts. obviously all the packets will fall out of it.

Better word?

[Todd Knarr]

For want of a better word? Um, guys, we have a better word for it: timesharing service bureau. We came up with it back in the 60s to describe a business that bought these hugely powerful, hugely expensive things called "mainframes" and sold access to them to customers. Customers could load their software and data onto the TSB's mainframes and run their programs there, paying for only the compute time they needed as they needed it. The TSB would also charge per kilobyte per month for disk storage (data and programs) and per minute for terminal connect time. Replace "mainframe" with "supercomputer" and you've got this new service (minus the connect-time charges since we're no longer using dial-up modems).

Re:Better word?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't the connect-time charge just have been shifted to the internet provider instead.

Big Announcement

[Anonymous Coward]

We have thought of a NEW PHRASE.
Do you like it?

No, they're the same, but this one is NEW.

More on bad naming

[earlymon]

In addition to bad naming for timesharing, I nominate them for the bad naming of their corp entity - Computation Research Laboratories, or CRL, for supercomputing anything.

Cray Research (CRI) or Cray Laboratories, anyone?

Indeed (was:Um...)

[Lead Butthead]

Time Shared comes to mind. So where do I submit my stack of punch cards?

Buy a bunch of PS3's?

[hofmny]

With the PS3 price cut looming, wouldn't it make sense to buy like 6 of those guys and Beowolf them? You can then rent out your computer to corporations and make back your investment ten-fold.

Re:Buy a bunch of PS3's?

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt many will want to write code for such a strange cluster. They want normal fortran and c compilers, with MPI.

Re:Buy a bunch of PS3's?

[Anonymous Coward]

(Note, I don't know if you were serious or not...)

          No. PS3 is just not fast compared to a modern desktop. The primary PS3 processor isn't fast at all compared to a modern chip, and anyone that wants to do something exotic like write Cell SPU code for a speed boost will just write GPGPU code (General Purpose GPU -- ie code that runs on the video card) for a desktop, spanking anything the PS3 will do.

about Indian English Speakers

[wsanders]

I worked with a lot of Indians in my previous job. The accent thing was a challenge. One day I remarked to an Indian coworker (who had a pretty thick answer herself), "I'm sorry to say this but I can't understand a word is saying."

She replied cheerfully, "Oh! Don't worry! I do not understand a word he is saying either!"

After that I never worried about it and just tried to be patient. After all, their English was better than my Hindi.
 

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Flamebait? Humor impaired much mod?

want one

[nevbear666]

what do we europeans have to do to get a taste of that nice services?

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I worked as an intern in this "new market" about 5 years ago maintaining the front end UI for a database of customers who rented time at the PSC. The app must have been at least 10 years old at the time, and I'm sure the database itself was even older and had been migrated several times. So yeah, those Tata guys are really breaking new ground here.

Best part of that job was visiting the supercomputer room occasionally. There was this giant array of IBM rack-mount servers that took up 75% of the room, I forget what that one was called, but you could walk between the aisles and feel the HEAT coming off of it! Then they installed LeMieux, which was about 1/10th the size of the other beast and much more powerful.

This is old news...

[painehope]

I was involved with IBM's "Compute On Demand" initiative about 6 years ago, and people have been renting time on systems for quite some time (no pun intended).

Sure, it's been refined many times over since the initial concept of time-sharing, but it's not a radical concept. What strikes me as humorous is that any time India does something, it's an innovation. I have news for you, my dear friends - there's just as many smart (and stupid) Indians as there are Americans. Their emergence into the mainstream IT world isn't a technological breakthrough, it's a social one. So stop patting them on the heads like little children, stop shipping American jobs overseas to India to save a buck, and just deal with it.

End of story.

How Supercomputer is being used 'as a service'

[Anonymous Coward]

Boeing is using Ekaâ(TM)s capability to bring its ideas faster to the market, by offering design and simulation support. Group company, Tata Motors, is using Eka for vehicle simulation and testing digital prototypes. - more