Slashdot Mirror
Google Offers Cheap Cloud Computing For Low-Priority Tasks
jfruh writes: Much of the history of computing products and services involves getting people desperate for better performance and faster results to pay a premium to get what they want. But Google has a new beta service that's going in the other direction — offering cheap cloud computing services for customers who don't mind waiting. Jobs like data analytics, genomics, and simulation and modeling can require lots of computational power, but they can run periodically, can be interrupted, and can even keep going if one or more nodes they're using goes offline.
cheap cloud computing for customers. called it!
Preemptible VMs are the same as regular instances except for one key difference - they may be shut down at any time.
It sounds like AWS's Spot Instances? Except for the fixed pricing.
In a way the cloud was big way back when. I remember in the late 70's my high school had a matrix dumb terminal tied to a couple college servers. It seems we are going back to that way of thinking. Use minimal hardware and let the power of the processing be handled elsewhere.
If only I was not using the low-priority cloud compting..
So you're a tech nerd who has an aversion to seeing ads.... Your life must be hell.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Google seems to commit to nothing, and everything is rolled out as Beta.
By time they have the bugs worked out everyone has forgotten it and the buzz is long since gone.
Other than search and selling ads I am confused as to where they actually turn a profit? Google+ is a dud, Android is given away, Glass cratered hard, self driving cars are years off (and I don't get it), and whatever their Second Life competitor was is gone, etc, etc.
So is Google just a Search/Ad money machine that can't figure out what to do with its Billions other than make really cool flops?
The cloud has never been anything but old technology with new buzzwords.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I dunno, I think those of us who are better at blocking ads than you--and aren't bored enough to spend all their time refreshing large companies' press release pages--might find this kind of article useful.
I have been programming since vi was considered advanced. I have to admit that features such as builtin debugging and autocompletion are very useful. I program in multiple languages and an IDE which understands the language I am using helps me greatly, especially when it knows about the library. I am more productive because of these tools.
Throw money at R&D until something sticks. Arguably, their investment in Android has solidified their core search business on mobile, so that's not the write-off you suggest. But like a lot of relatively young companies, Google every so often tries to be edgy and then realizes that it's grown up and has shareholders now.
i know you guys used to have operating systems and a process abstraction. but now i nest operating systems and processes
layers deep, and went back and added lots of hacks to try to mitigate the huge overheads involved with doing so. but
since that wasn't enough indirection, i added a container layer on top of all that.
my container runs on a virtual network which is attached to another virtual network
none of this runs without a bevy of distributed services that i don't even know about, much less understand
now i can't say anything about anything, and when it fails i simply shrug
bow before my awesome power you neckbeard
Small comment on that last point:
Any large-scale computing implementation must be able to deal with nodes going offline. For example, if typically you have one hour of downtime per machine per year, and are running a process on 10,000 nodes, then at any given time you have about a 64% chance of having at least one node down. If you have to restart the process on all 10,000 nodes, that's going to be a huge amount of wasted computing power.
You forgot about Google Play selling apps, books, music and video. That wouldn't exist without Android
Back in the day, you could set your priority on a Cray XMP to 0.01 so that you got 100x the minutes you were allocated but that your code only ran when the machine was otherwise idle.
Or SETI@home. Now we can find out how much it costs to find each Little Green Man.
Looks like the perfect match to run systemd.
Achille Talon
Hop!
It sounds like this is modelled after the SETI@home project (which I think evolved into BOINC?), though maybe in reverse
Berkeley: Hello, world, you're wasting CPU cycles, do you mind if we use them?
Google: We've got a bunch of underutilized CPUs. Hello, World, how do you want to use them?
I suspect the Google model would work better for data that can't be broken into parallel tasks as easily, but overall it sounds like both approaches are designed for similar things.
This is a really good idea from a resource utilization standpoint. Reminds me a lot of the power grid - you have to have enough hardware to handle the peak load, but idle capacity just costs you money.
I didn't know they had HTTPS in the 60s! I stand corrected!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Didn't work with a lot of mainframes, but I know the VAX multi-CPU systems could do that and I would be surprised it IBM and Tandem didn't as well. Of course a "complex" network at that time was half a dozen nodes, but it's a matter of degree rather than a whole new paradigm.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
So, because this specific tree that you choose is different, somehow the forest as a whole has changed entirely, lets just call it a field instead.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Glass hasn't "cratered hard", just the marketing people misjudged the market sector. It's very much alive and well, and being refocused towards market sectors that are actually interested in its utility, such as medicine, engineering, architecture and spelunking(?). Personally I loathe driving, the day of the self-driving car can't come soon enough for me (although it probably wouldn't let me grossly overload the suspension with landscaping blocks, so I will probably still be stuck driving my truck from time to time.) From "20 years away" in 2010 to 3 or 4 years away now, the advances have been astounding.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I was a VAX/VMS Systems manager in the early 1990s, and no, that is not true. For christ sake there was no www and Ethernet was based on Coaxial Cable, with UTP just coming to market, and nobody was transferring complete OS images from machine to machine and running and stopping them on the fly. Period.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Slow on the uptake are we? Most trees changed. It is a different forest. I really would love to send you back to the 60s so you could see how stupid you sound making a different claim.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Amazon's spot instances are better in every way. Not only are they usually cheaper than Google's fixed prices, but you can run them for way more than 24 hours. I have a Spot Instance running for 4 months at about 1/25th the price of the on-demand instance, and way cheaper than Google's preemptible instance too.
The limit of 24 hours seems to be designed to prevent people who want to run long-running tasks from using up the spare compute power on something like a VPN. That's fine with me; Amazon can have my business instead. :D
Clusters? Been out for decades.
Virtual machines? Been out for decades.
Hosted operating systems? Been out for decades.
Distributed clusters over corporate networks? Been out for decades.
The only thing "new" about the "cloud" is using the public internet instead of a corporate VPN for the network.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.