Buying Computing by the Computon 189
theodp writes "Seeking to emulate the pricing models utilities use to charge customers for kilowatt-hours of electricity based on the ebb and flow of power demand, HP Researchers have come up with a new unit-of-computing metric, the Computon, which is not to be confused with the 'Power Unit' and 'Service Unit' pricing metrics from Sun and IBM. California, here we come!"
computons? COMPUTONS?! (Score:5, Funny)
Get 'em! (Score:3, Funny)
Get yer Computons here! Only 3 for a farthing! Get 'em while their hot!
Re:Get 'em! (Score:2, Funny)
What flavor is it?
Re:Get 'em! (Score:2)
Oi gots bigendian and littleendian and surr, but my discerning customers are all goin' for these little trits, half again as tasty and better than those new quantum jobbies, I don't hold with no being...uncertain-like about me number-crunching...
Is that Something like MIPS (Score:2)
Re:Is that Something like MIPS (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Is that Something like MIPS (Score:3, Interesting)
Unless, of course, you wish to believe the old folks who might otherwise tell you it stands for Millions of Instructions Per Second. Back in the good-old-days, before the current abundant crop of benchmarks, people tended to measure CPUs more simply. You used to hear arguments of "my RISC chip performs more cycles per second than your CISC chip" or "my CISC chip performs more work per cycle than your RISC chip." (Anyone else notice the passing of CIS
Re:Is that Something like MIPS (Score:3, Interesting)
This sounds like a good bit more complicated, and could lead to rather wierd results like you end up paying more for CPU time because you had to wait longer to get the computation done (it was a high-load period).
The cheapest CPU time on MTS were 'deferred priority' batch jobs. They generally only got ran on weekends and after
How many gigaquads of data (Score:2, Funny)
I like my servers like I like my music (Score:4, Interesting)
so basicly what HP is saying is that depending on how hard I work the servers will effect some monthly payment I make to them.
so, does this lower the cost of service contracts becasue companies that push their servers harder require more service than those who have low or moderate useage?
Re:I like my servers like I like my music (Score:3, Interesting)
RTFA. This applies to customers who outsource their IT to HP. If you actually own the hardware then this article doesn't directly affect you.
so, does this lower the cost of service contracts becasue companies that push their servers harder require more service than those who have low or moderate useage?
In theory, yes. However, this wouldn't be the first time that a company used obsfucation as a sly means of increasing its revenues.
Confusion? (Score:3, Funny)
Huh (Score:3, Funny)
i wonder (Score:2, Interesting)
In other news . . . (Score:2, Funny)
or.. (Score:3, Informative)
Install an cluster and get all the "Computons" you want without a goofy licensing scheme. [openmosix.org]
More than meets the eye! (Score:4, Funny)
1.6 energon cubes = 1 computon
/.'ed already - anti karma whore mode activated (Score:4, Informative)
Researchers at Hewlett-Packard Co. are developing a new pricing approach for the outsourced capacity-on-demand computing services the company offers. But several IT managers said they're worried that the plan is too complex.
Under HP's scheme, prices would vary based on factors such as the overall demand placed on servers, storage devices and other IT resources, said Bernardo Huberman, an HP fellow and director of the systems research center at the company's HP Labs unit.
He added that a new unit-of-computing metric, which is being called a "computon" inside HP, would be akin to the pricing models that utilities use to charge customers for kilowatt-hours of electricity based on the ebb and flow of power demand.
Huberman acknowledged that the computon effort is complicated. For instance, HP will have to account for variables such as how well its data centers perform and the amount of computing resources that customers require, he said. HP also needs to figure out a way to build in pricing provisions to cover the possibility that companies will use more or less of a specific IT resource, like CPU cycles, than they have contracted for on a monthly basis.
Analysts said new IT pricing approaches are needed to support the emerging utility-based computing capabilities being offered by HP and rivals such as IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. Those two companies said they also have pricing updates in the works.
But the computon concept, which is due for initial testing within HP early next year, did not wow IT executives interviewed last week.
"It sounds too complicated to me," said Malcolm Fields, CIO at HON Industries Inc., a maker of office furniture and fireplaces in Muscatine, Iowa.
"The last thing that we need is another complicated licensing scheme," Fields said. "What we need is a quick and easy way to buy more computing power, and I need to be able to buy it in very small, inexpensive increments."
"I'm not sure I would like it at all, and I don't think it would fly," said Tim Cronin, manager of IT at Nobel Biocare USA Inc., a Yorba Linda, Calif.-based maker of dental implants. "How in the world would you calculate all the variables?"
HP probably will be able to "come up with some matrix that will look very impressive," Cronin added. But he also questioned whether IT managers would be able to measure their computon usage and whether the plan would provide cost benefits to users.
Evolutionary Step
Some analysts were more positive about HP's plan, describing it as an evolutionary step in the development of utility-based computing.
"We will eventually get to a point where [IT vendors] charge for usage in real time," said Thornton May, a futurist in Biddeford, Maine, and a Computerworld columnist. "If you want electricity on a hot day, you pay more. If you want bandwidth on a busy pipe-traffic day, you pay more."
Efforts by IT services vendors like HP, IBM and Sun to develop new methods of pricing for utility-based computing "are well placed," said Howard Rubin, executive vice president at Meta Group Inc. in Stamford, Conn.
But Rubin said the task won't be an easy one. "When true physics aren't involved, it's hard to come up with something meaningful, auditable and defensible for pricing," he noted.
In addition, Rubin said that he doesn't think rival vendors will work together to develop a standard capacity-on-demand pricing metric.
A spokesman for IBM said it's now offering mainframe Linux hosting customers a "service unit" pricing approach. The pricing is based partly on the cost of the hardware being run by IBM, as well as its IT labor costs. It runs on a free operating system for homosexuals, by homosexuals, competing head to head (pun intended) with Apple's OSX. IBM also factors in the average amount of hourly mainframe CPU capacity used over a 24-hour period and then tracks monthly utilization rates to come up with the service unit cost, the spokesman said.
In April, Sun introduced a pricing
Gee, nice add-in there... (Score:4, Funny)
gives a whole new meaning to RTFA!
Re: (Score:2)
Try my unit of measure (Score:3, Funny)
The MEEDO is how long it takes for me to do something.
This post is .30 MEEDOs. You owe me 10,000 dollars.
(I only need to sell one.)
Re:Try my unit of measure (Score:2)
hmm... (Score:2)
Now they are trying to position themselves as a "services" company. That's just pathetic.
Re:hmm... (Score:2)
pathetic? I would suggest this is the reality in the coming economy, think of the ROI when i don't have to have out of date hardware sitting onsite, I can just outsource computons.. an excellent business model. Kudos to HP. this may even help the environment by requiring less actual hardware overall for everyones computing needs.
Compare with computron (Score:5, Informative)
From Jargon File (4.0.0/24 July 1996) [jargon]:
computron
computing power combining instruction speed and storage capacity,
dimensioned roughly in instructions-per-second times
megabytes-of-main-store times megabytes-of-mass-storage. "That
machine can't run GNU Emacs, it doesn't have enough computrons!"
This usage is usually found in metaphors that treat computing power
as a fungible commodity good, like a crop yield or diesel
horsepower. See {bitty box}, {Get a real computer!},
{toy}, {crank}. 2. A mythical subatomic particle that bears
the unit quantity of computation or information, in much the same
way that an electron bears one unit of electric charge (see also
{bogon}). An elaborate pseudo-scientific theory of computrons
has been developed based on the physical fact that the molecules in
a solid object move more rapidly as it is heated. It is argued
that an object melts because the molecules have lost their
information about where they are supposed to be (that is, they have
emitted computrons). This explains why computers get so hot and
require air conditioning; they use up computrons. Conversely, it
should be possible to cool down an object by placing it in the path
of a computron beam. It is believed that this may also explain why
machines that work at the factory fail in the computer room: the
computrons there have been all used up by the other hardware.
(This theory probably owes something to the "Warlock" stories
by Larry Niven, the best known being "What Good is a Glass
Dagger?", in which magic is fueled by an exhaustible natural
resource called `mana'.)
Re:Compare with computron (Score:5, Interesting)
IANAP, but I wouldn't call the proposed correspondence between negentropy and information (as defined by Shannon) "pseudo-science". It's precisely this sort of cross-disciplinary metaphor which is so highly valued within Mathematics.
Liquid things do have higher levels of entropy than solid things. And computers do get hot because they're determining where electrons are and then forgetting that information (to use Norrestranders' (in The User Illusion) way of putting things).* If you could constrain the molecules in an object, it would be colder. The factory comment, though, is part of a strawman argument.
* I seem to recall reading something on /. years ago about computing that recycles the contents of registers to lower waste heat. Am I on drugs?
Re:Compare with computron (Score:3, Interesting)
Almost. Reversible computing builds all of its primitives to prevent losing information -- evidently, this directly causes it to produce less heat. See Baker's papers [nec.com] for more information.
Am I on drugs?
Um... Hard to say. Perhaps this would make a good Ask Slashdot question?
-Billy
Re:Compare with computron (Score:2)
Yes, that's exactly what I was talking about! So linear computation could be described as computron-preserving:
Save Computrons! Reduce cycles, Reuse your cache, and Recycle bits!
Re:Compare with computron (Score:2)
Re:Compare with computron (Score:2)
If anybody thinks Feynman was a pseudo scientist, they are an idiot.
Re:Compare with computron (Score:2)
(Ah, the joys of reliving precious childhood obsessions through Kazaa downloads.)
Not aimed at consumers... (Score:5, Informative)
What'll be interesting is when consumer-conglomerates pop up (akin to SETI@home or Folding@home or spamkillers@home) to sell excess processing cycles from home computers... There's many more of us around than there are resources at HP...
-T
Re:Not aimed at consumers... (Score:2)
Re:Not aimed at consumers... (Score:2)
Re:Not aimed at consumers... (Score:2)
Re:Not aimed at consumers... (Score:2)
Re:Not aimed at consumers... (Score:2)
Here [lightandmatter.com] is my proposal for doing that, and dealing with the spam problem at the same time.
More realistic measurement (Score:2, Funny)
Units (Score:2)
How about a poon-tron?
california blackouts: case *for* regulation (Score:5, Insightful)
The power companies, colluding with the marketers themeselves, PURPOSEFULLY manipulated the energy market in california to raise prices [chron.com]. the rolling blackouts were the 'shot across the bow' of regulation-advocates; "we'll shut your damn power off it you dont pay" extortion.
Why is this on-topic? because someday, in the future, computing-as-utility will become as necessary as electricity is today... want to get a job? have to have computing-ability. Want to pay your bills? have to have computing-ability. want to get a loan? have to have computing-ability. want to vote? have to have computing-ability.. without accepting that WHEN THIS HAPPENS, that regulation of the industry in the public interest becomes necessary... unless you want the future-monied-kings to shut down your house/town/state.
Electricity: yes, Computation: no (Score:2)
Re:Patents: likely (Score:2)
Re:california blackouts: case *for* regulation (Score:2)
Yeah, there's a shock - private companies with the reins pulled off go crazy. California was stupid in HOW it deregulated. If they'd simply allowed 5% cost increases for the next 10 years, then removed all regulation, thi
Re:california blackouts: case *for* regulation (Score:5, Informative)
First off, let me say that I agree in one respect: if one or more companies are given a monopoly for providing electricity, then they must be regulated.
Having said that, what we saw in California's gray-outs was not a consequence of deregulation. It was a consequence of a preposterous regulatory policy. IIRC, the California utilities were explicitly forbidden from raising the rates that they charged to customers in order to cover the rising prices that they were facing.
This is nothing but price controls, and price ceilings will virtually always guarantee the creation of shortages.
By subjecting the utilities to the open market for the purchase of electricity, while at the same time prohibiting them from engaging in the rational pricing activities required by an open market, the state of California created the perfect conditions for that nightmare to occur.
You can't blame so-called "deregulation" for it. That's as silly as believing that NAFTA creates "free trade". Genuine free trade doesn't need an encyclopedic and baffling legal code to enforce; it simply requires the elimination of tariffs and other burdens upon commerce. By the same token, it's ridiculous to call something "deregulated" if the players can't set their own prices.
Re:california blackouts: case *for* regulation (Score:2)
There were no shortages. A friend of mine works for Sunsweet and part of his job is monitoring a fricken website which shows the total load and capacity. We never got within 10% of capacity, and they were doing rolling blackouts.
The rolling blackouts were simply a warning that they're like Lily Tomlin doing the phone company skit on SNL; We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone c
Re:california blackouts: case *for* regulation (Score:2)
First of all, a price-control-generated shortage is not characterized by high capacity. It's characterized by having nothing available to sell: merchants become either unwilling (because they lose too much) and/or unable (because they don't have the money to pay for inventory) to stock their shelves. There could be a zillion potential customers at the artificially low price, but there is nothing for them to buy.
Translating that
Re:california blackouts: case *for* regulation (Score:2)
After those two screw-ups, he got re-elected and now will be laying off a large percentage of the states teachers. Will he succeed in blaming it on those evil Republicans? Probably.
Don't be stupid. (Score:2)
FLOP? (Score:4, Interesting)
The important thing here is that HP is putting forward the idea of computation as a commodity. I just wish some researchers could have published a journal article instead of letting the marketing dept. get their greasy paws all over it.
Re:FLOP? (Score:2)
Re:FLOP? (Score:2)
Re:FLOP? (Score:2)
The problem with flop (or bogomips, or whatever), is that they really only measure the processor speed. HP, IBM, and Sun would are using these measures to paper over the fact that their expensive servers are not anywhere near price competitive with Intel or AMD servers when it comes to raw processor power.
To some extent their rules are justifiable as there is more to computer performance than processor speed, but the primary reason for coming up with these bogus units is that it makes it more difficult t
Coding Revolution (Score:5, Insightful)
Just think of the issues this can raise with optimization. Realizing that some junior programmer just cost you 50,000 computons because he didn't initialize a variable.
Maybe this is what we need to get people to start thinking like this again. For the love of god, anything to get some cleaner code.
Re:Coding Revolution (Score:2)
It seems to me there is only a few main things that have changed. They changed the unit of measurement from time to this new computron (which will probably only confuse the some customers), and the hardware
Re:Coding Revolution (Score:2)
But just how much do 50,000 computons cost?
Re:Coding Revolution (Score:2)
Re:Coding Revolution (Score:3, Interesting)
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
The cleanest code will also be some of the most inefficient. (Note it does not work the other way around, of course, so read that sentence carefully before criticizing it!) The most efficient code will be pug-fugly, incredibly difficult to read without intimate knowlege of the whole system code, and will be very difficult to correctly change to boot.
Done much program
Re:Coding Revolution (Score:2)
Maybe back in the days programmers knew what they were doing and were optimizing with assembly, but not these days. Nowadays, they write thirty lines of code when they should've just written i++. It's even at the design level. They'll use a beowulf cluster of XML parsers when they just need to write a few integer values into a file. In these troubled days, "optimized" means "leave out the crap".
Computon (Score:2)
"Beware! I am the mighty Computon!"
Re:Computon (Score:2)
COMPUTON, MAN OF THE FUTURE!
Watch the chicks start pouring in.
So how long... (Score:2, Insightful)
Another US Imperialistic Plot! (Score:3, Funny)
UN COMPOST
Stop messing with our heads!
Re:Another US Imperialistic Plot! (Score:2, Funny)
COM NOT UP - The system is down yo.
MOUNT COP - New file system or perversion of the legal system?
PC MUON TO - The sub-atomic particle that Computons are made of.
NU PC TOOM - Where old computers go when they die.
UNO PC TOM - How many computers Tom can afford now that he pays by the computon.
Props to Internet Anagram Server [wordsmith.org]
Oh man. (Score:2, Funny)
However... (Score:5, Funny)
Let's just hope that NASA ... (Score:2)
Destined for failure (Score:2)
Today, you can pick up a cheap server for $500. You want to double your capacity, spend another $500. As long as those machines meet your needs, there is no need to put out more money. Say they last 3 years -- $1000/5 = $200 per year. I haven't seen prices for computing on demand, but it pretty much
Re:Destined for failure (Score:2)
Use the idle computer resources that are sitting on all the employees' desks. Got a dozen people sitting in a meeting? Let their desktop systems chew on some of the extra workload that's swamping the servers. I
Re:Destined for failure (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree that in its current form, this on-demand computing model will probably fail. Utility computing is mostly a vision put together by a bunch of executives that believe they can build a revenue stream analogous to power companies. They push the vision through the marketing department who make the vision all glossy and ready to sell to other companies. Research and Development teams are then instructed to come up with an implementation of the utility computing vision. From that directive you get the
servers minor part of cost (Score:2)
If you outsource all of that work and pay a "computing utility" to perform all of these jobs then it starts making sense. A company could provide this service to many companies, which makes managing the va
HP Reinvent! (Score:2)
Having sold their core business of testing and measurements, HP has been soul searching for a new relevant buisness model. This one is perfect! They can put to work all the Compaq computers they are not selling and they get to invent a new unit of measure. Excellent! It's just like the good old days when IBM and others rented time on their big iron. Such a new model. Others were sceptical of the complexity of the approach. One HP programmer who wished to remain anonymous said, "I don't know if we can
unused minutes? (Score:2)
I believe the cell phone companies already figured this one out: rollover minutes!
I have a new measurement too... (Score:2, Funny)
I feel like the proffesor from the simpsons!
Perfect name for what he does (Score:3, Funny)
If you're going to be a futurist, Thornton May seems like the perfect name to have. I just don't see this guy doing construction...
Re:Perfect name for what he does (Score:2)
Computons... (Score:2, Informative)
Your bill? (Score:2)
Additions to IT worker's resume (Score:4, Funny)
20 years experience with Unix
Able to turn back computon meters- saving you millions!
Works well in large groups...
Messin' wit their heads? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
HP announces interested parties (Score:2)
Enron, Worldcom, HealthSouth to name a few.
April 1st RFC! (Score:3, Funny)
Caaannnn't....reeessist..... (Score:2)
COMPUTON TRANSFORM!!!!!
Plus ca change... (Score:2)
Yea verily there was much cheering as we broke the surly bonds of DEC and acquired BBC Micros and, later on, IBM PCs. And the world did acquire color, and th
COuld they win? (Score:2)
Only me? (Score:3, Interesting)
A question for my fellow
When I read things like this, I feel very, very unhappy. I have a PC that does what I want, when I want it, and I don't pay any additional fees to use its capabilities. I don't pay more if I actually fill my HDD vs leaving it nearly empty. I don't pay more if I leave my CPU 99.9% idle compared to running three distributed clients just to keep every single cycle busy doing "real" work.
I feel similarly about the software I use. I have an OS and a few apps, and I don't pay more when I actually use them compared with leaving them sitting uselessly on the disk. I don't pay for each image I Photoshop, I don't pay for each program invoked by the OS, I don't even pay every time I decide to surf the web.
Even media files, I don't pay-per-view. If I queue up a bunch of Vorbis files, I don't pay every time I listen. Nor do I pay for watching a DVD I own.
Yet, companies keep trying to move their business models to "buy once, pay forever". I can see the obvious benefits to the company, but it has NO benefit to the consumers.
So to get to my actual question... Does anyone see even the faintest bit of logic behind these companies moving toward pay-per-use schemes? Not logic like "we'll make more money if we get enough suckers", obviously, but some real sensible reason why people might prefer to abandon any concept of "owning" the things they use daily, rather than paying continuously for "access" to them?
yes, but.... (Score:3, Funny)
So all in all, looks like another bad idea by those dastardly multinational heartless corporations.
Technogeek website slash-n-burninator website is exploding with posts decrying that "it's all SCOs fault, or microsoft, and we don't care who gets nuked"
Mozilla.org has issued an emergency decree that henceforth, all bits will be named firebits, until next week, when they will be called phonexiabits.
Gentoo supporters are dropping like flies as they try to compile programs that are contaminated with evile bits, and vow to never speak the word california again.
*BSD users have moved to canada en massee, the largest IT refugee movement in world history, where they have issued a release saying " eh, it's colder up here, eh, but we don't care mon, look what's legal here now".
France, Germany, China and Russia have stopped all trade with california, and the UN has put california on the "sandbox" list of contaminated areas. Unfortunately, drudgereport has broken with a scoop that in reality, all the contaminated batches of evile bits got sent to california on Cosco container ships, with joint funding from the various "axis of dastards" nations. They are also issuing a demand via the UN that all computron evil bits be measured using the metric system "or else".
In the mideast, it's the same ole crap, and no one cares really.
Time warner AOL msnbc fox cnn abc and the RIAA and MPAA have declared that they have checked and there are "no" contaminated bits anyplace in their websites, but 85 million zaZZaers dispute this, as all files that have been traded since the begining of the crisis all say $%^&**((*%^&%%&&^*^* YOU!!, and have been apparently been done by the trio of madonna, yoko ono, and william shatner.
It's GENERAL MAYHEM AND PANDEMONIUM!
In economic news, sales of manual adding machines and typewriters were brisk today.....
Well guess what... (Score:2, Funny)
=)
Intriguingly that was the first link returned when I googled the proposed term.
Sounds familiar (Score:3, Informative)
Metric? (Score:2)
Another Computron (Score:4, Funny)
Thornton May didn't read the article... (Score:3, Insightful)
Computrons for years at MIT (Score:3, Informative)
Further, one has been able to purchase time on supercomputers at varying rates since there have been supercomputer centers (again, early 80s?) where the rates depended on time of day, requested priority, etc. While I have no direct knowledge, one can readily assume the same was true even with batch processing mainframes: pay more and your job gets put closer to the top of the stack.
So, what's new then? HP wants to factor in more variables in their pricing structure. This is a big deal?
Only processes, no threads... (Score:3, Funny)
Okay, bad joke. I only hope this gets modded down as repetitive. Someone else must have come up with this by now.
Looking Way Forward (Score:2)
Back to the service bureaus of the 1970s. (Score:2)
That industry is totally dead. Computation became too cheap to meter.
This new scheme sounds like another micropayment idea. Like most micropayment ideas, it suffers from the problem that all the enthusiasm is from the people who want to collect the payments, not the people who want to make them. That's why micropayment
Great... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:How novel an idea (Score:2)
I was thinking the same think and noticed that there's no currently-pending (or at least not-yet-indexed) U.S. trademark application for COMPUTON for 'leasing of computer facilities'. I mean, the article did suggest that the term "computon" was only being used inside HP, but I suspect they'll want to use it for customers later, especially now that they have some press.
So, any of us have a "bona fide intention to use" COMPUTON for services along these lines? $335, a hotmail a
Re:How novel an idea (Score:3, Interesting)
I am currently working on one of IBM's biggest On Demand deals [ibm.com]. You seem to know enough about IBM's On Demand initiative to know that it's not the same as HP's angle.. at all. The article specifically mentions HP hosting the equipment, as opposed to the IBM way, which is to basically perform a server consolidation onto