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

[dzfoo]

That's true mostly for data centers in Florida.

        -dZ.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.