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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.'"

19 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 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...

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      No sig for the moment.
    3. Re:Or by dzfoo · · Score: 4, Funny

      That's true mostly for data centers in Florida.

              -dZ.

      --
      Carol vs. Ghost
      ...Can you save Christmas?
    4. 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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    5. 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.

  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 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.

  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.

  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
  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_.

  8. 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.

    --
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  9. 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).