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Supercomputer As a Service

Posted by samzenpus on from the do-your-own-base-pair-matching dept.

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.'"

55 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. Or by rackserverdeals · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

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    Dual Opteron < $600
    1. Re:Or by Samschnooks · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Or by Timothy+Brownawell · · Score: 1

      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.

    3. Re:Or by rackserverdeals · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      Dual Opteron < $600
    4. Re:Or by palegray.net · · Score: 1, Flamebait

      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.

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      512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
    5. Re:Or by Abreu · · Score: 2, Funny

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

      --
      No sig for the moment.
    6. Re:Or by dzfoo · · Score: 1

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

            -dZ.

      --
      Carol vs. Ghost
      ...Can you save Christmas?
    7. Re:Or by dzfoo · · Score: 4, Funny

      That's true mostly for data centers in Florida.

              -dZ.

      --
      Carol vs. Ghost
      ...Can you save Christmas?
    8. Re:Or by ducomputergeek · · Score: 1

      really? I thought we called it timeshare.

      --
      "The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
    9. Re:Or by palegray.net · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

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      512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
    10. Re:Or by Have+Brain+Will+Rent · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
    11. Re:Or by palegray.net · · Score: 1

      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.

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      512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
    12. Re:Or by 2names · · Score: 1

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

      --
      "I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
    13. Re:Or by Red+Flayer · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      "Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
    14. Re:Or by Jurily · · Score: 1

      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?

    15. Re:Or by triceice · · Score: 1

      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

    16. Re:Or by palegray.net · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
    17. Re:Or by palegray.net · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
    18. Re:Or by Jurily · · Score: 2, Funny

      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.

    19. Re:Or by Have+Brain+Will+Rent · · Score: 1

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

      --
      The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
    20. Re:Or by Hurricane78 · · Score: 1

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

      --
      Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
    21. Re:Or by Hurricane78 · · Score: 1

      Then learn their language!

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

      --
      Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
    22. Re:Or by palegray.net · · Score: 1

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

      --
      512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
    23. Re:Or by Matt+Perry · · Score: 1

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

      Something has to be different so they can patent it.

      --
      Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
    24. Re:Or by lucifer_666 · · Score: 1

      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.

  2. Um... by FrameRotBlues · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Um... by A.+B3ttik · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Um... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

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

    3. Re:Um... by Warlord88 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:Um... by hitmark · · Score: 1

      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?

      --
      comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
    5. Re:Um... by Hurricane78 · · Score: 1

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

      --
      Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
    6. Re:Um... by FMZ · · Score: 1

      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.

  3. In Short: by KefkaZ · · Score: 3, Funny

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

  4. Nothing new to see here by TheCycoONE · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Nothing new to see here by aerosmith1 · · Score: 1

      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!

  5. In all seriousness by areusche · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:In all seriousness by interkin3tic · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:In all seriousness by vlm · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
    3. Re:In all seriousness by dkf · · Score: 1

      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).

      --
      "Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
    4. Re:In all seriousness by interkin3tic · · Score: 1

      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.

  6. Not only not new - it never went away by Brett+Buck · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  7. Everything old is new again by Aloisius · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Everything old is new again by meatmanek · · Score: 2, Informative

      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_.

    2. Re:Everything old is new again by Todd+Knarr · · Score: 1

      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.

  8. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1, Redundant

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  9. Re:but! by dzfoo · · Score: 1, Funny

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

          -dZ.

    --
    Carol vs. Ghost
    ...Can you save Christmas?
  10. What? by jDeepbeep · · Score: 1

    No Beowulf cluster comments yet? I am shocked.

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  11. this will never sell... by nimbius · · Score: 2, Funny

    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.

    --
    Good people go to bed earlier.
  12. Better word? by Todd+Knarr · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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).

  13. More on bad naming by earlymon · · Score: 1

    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?

    --
    Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
  14. Indeed (was:Um...) by Lead+Butthead · · Score: 1

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

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  15. Buy a bunch of PS3's? by hofmny · · Score: 1

    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.

  16. about Indian English Speakers by wsanders · · Score: 1

    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.
     

    --
    Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
  17. want one by nevbear666 · · Score: 1

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

  18. This is old news... by painehope · · Score: 1

    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.

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