Sun Enters Grid-Computing Rental Market 275
mOoZik writes "BBC News is reporting that Sun Microsystems has launched a pay-as-you-go service which will allow customers requiring huge computing power to rent it by the hour. "Why build your own grid when you can use ours for a buck an hour?" asks Sun's COO Jonathan Schwartz."
$1 per CPU hour (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet, it will probably be very cost effective for certain applications, where the cost of building and maintaining your own computing grid would be prohibitive.
Somehow the thought of the world moving back towards "mainframe" style computing with truly "central processors" and everyone with a terminal in their home is comforting in a nostalgic sort of way.
Re:$1 per CPU hour (Score:5, Funny)
Re:$1 per CPU hour (Score:3, Insightful)
As for the grandparent post - you can host your UT3 tourney - just charge each player $3/hour
Because its Sun... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Because its Sun... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Because its Sun... (Score:2)
We are not talking mom-n-pop shop here...we are talking higher end. So a university who decides to use this is probably doing so becuase it is just one or two short-term projects...but if that university plans on doing many future computing projects (not unlikely) the
Re:Because its Sun... (Score:2)
Re:Because its Sun... (Score:4, Insightful)
Suppose you do some fancy quarterly statistics/forcasting analysis that take 20 hours on that 1,000 CPU cluster( which would have taken you 833 days to run on a single CPU machine). That might be your only major need for intense CPU power.
That's when you want to use these clusters. For the price of $20,000 each quarter you can avoid the cost of a 1000 cpu cluster (which will be several hundred thousand dollars at least), plus building space, maintenance, cooling, power, administration cost, etc, etc, etc. Plus SUN will likely be upgrading their clusters regularly, and that would be an additional cost to you to keep upgrading your own cluster. Sun's deal makes a lot of sense for occasional use high intensity jobs.
If you have enough researchers doing enough things to keep one busy most of the time, then yes, you are right, it would be cost effective to build your own. But there are going to be a lot of places that don't have such a high continual need.
Re:$1 per CPU hour (Score:4, Funny)
1. Charge $1 per hour of CPU time on your cluster.
2. Lower the speed of your processors.
3. Runtime of tasks increase. So your $1 does less.
4. PROFIT!!!!
Cool, no ???? step!
Re:$1 per CPU hour (Score:2, Insightful)
Where this is going of course, as the article touches on, is the commoditisation of raw computing power, making it a product like iron ore, coal or oil. Genericism will, IMHO, be a really interesting force behind evolution of computational techniques over the next 10 years.
With genericism perhaps there can be no monopoly in provision o
Re:$1 per CPU hour (Score:3, Informative)
Indeed!
Our research group recently bought a small cluster (around 40 processors), and as the project moved forward, it found that finding a good place to put it with sufficient cooling and power infrastructure was quite a bit more costly than originally assumed.
The idea of renting a lot of computing power without bothering with these issues is very attractive. -- Paul
Re:$1 per CPU hour (Score:2)
Do you know that because you actually RTFA, or did you just look at the banner ads that have been running on /. since before the story was posted?
(Anyone else find it funny that the news posting on /. announcing this seemed to come after it was already being advertised on /.?)
Re:$1 per CPU hour (Score:2)
Re:$1 per CPU hour (Score:2, Funny)
Re:$1 per CPU hour (Score:2, Interesting)
The world has been heading this way for quite some time now.
VNC has single-handedly caused a huge come-back in remote computing. Projects like the LTSP and Sun's thin-terminals have helped as well. But none of those things ever seemed a candidate to replace a computer on your desk, because of performance, and
Can Spamers use it (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Can Spamers use it (Score:2, Funny)
advert (Score:2, Insightful)
Woo-hoo! (Score:5, Funny)
Beow....wait a minute (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Beow....wait a minute (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Beow....wait a minute (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Beow....wait a minute (Score:2)
Depends on how you look at it. Weta Digital spent a fortune on a render farm for LOTR, but that money got recouped on the film, and they now rent on time on the render farm to universities, research groups, and businesses. If you really need that powerful cluster now you may as well build your own and then sell off time on it at 90c per CPU hour when you're done and it's not under heavy load anymore.
Jedidiah.
Re:Beow....wait a minute (Score:2, Insightful)
Financial mining and oil companies will have a HUGE use for this: mining for geology, oil for fluids and financial pricing, financials, obviously, for financial pricing (ranging from neural nets to weather).
So once we've stripped out pharma, bio, oil, mining, financials... there aren't many large company industries left! Plus, I'm really interested how academia will take to this.
Re:click (Score:2)
Re:Beow....wait a minute (Score:2)
Interesting to see the future... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Interesting to see the future... (Score:2)
Re:Interesting to see the future... (Score:2)
Re:Interesting to see the future... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I think corporate research would be much more of a market. For one, if you have an academic department doing the kind of research which requires heavy computing, then their need is probably going to be pretty constant, and you'll be better off building your own grid. And the ones who don't need that power on a day-to-day basis are usually picking up the slack on the university grids. Academia has a long and established tradition of collaboration and pooling common resources, from telescopes to particle accelerators.
Corporate research is a better target, where you might, for instance, need big computational resources for a certain project or contract, but not on a day-to-day basis.
Re:Interesting to see the future... (Score:2)
Doesn't seem effecient (Score:4, Insightful)
If you can solve your problem in an hour anyway, I dont think its worth the time to have a grid computer do it. You might as well just run it on your own system, however big.
Re:Doesn't seem effecient (Score:3, Insightful)
But if you can solve your problem in an hour on a grid, what is the point of having your own system for the rest of the time?
Re:Doesn't seem effecient (Score:2)
-rent a dedicated server for a month for 150 bucks, have control over your system, solve your problem as many times as you want, etc.
-pay a dollar/PERPROCESSOR/PERHOUR for a one time shot, while sharing resources with everyone else, while not having control over the system, etc.
Im thinking the first option would be really worth it.
The only situation where a service like this would be useful is if someone needs a HUGE amount of processing power, but onl
Re:Doesn't seem effecient (Score:3, Informative)
What if you wanted to do a research project on the fluid mechanics of the jetstream? (completely hypothetical, and just as an example of an operation that could be parallelized for speed). Your little 1-2 proc
Re:Doesn't seem effecient (Score:4, Interesting)
Not true at all. Supercomputers have been used like the Sun Grid will be used for years. Theyve simply never been quite this cheap.
Even with custom software, you can develop it on a much smaller grid (two computers), develop your data set, then copy it all to Sun's grid and run it with the real data. Again, this has been done for decades with old style supercomputers.
I recall developing a FORTRAN program on my university's Cyber (early 1980s) on my personal account (we got a certain amount per quarter to do whatever we wanted with), then running it with the full data set on an IBM mainframe through a timesharing company for my customer. This paid for a quarter or two of schooling. 8^)
Re:Doesn't seem effecient (Score:2)
You rent as many cpu-hours as you need. Need it by tomorrow, rent more CPUs; next week, fewer CPUs.
Also, this grid is running Solaris 10 on various Sun servers. I'm sure they can provide a cluster of Sun Fire 25Ks if you need to rent a few teraflops. When those teraflops aren't needed, their Grid Engine puts other tasks on those 25Ks, so they never go to waste.
"Why build one?" (Score:5, Insightful)
So I can charge 90 cents an hour.
Re:"Why build one?" (Score:2)
Instructions: (Score:2, Funny)
2- Insert DVD containing program in the tray on your right.
3- Please wait...
Talk about irony... (Score:2, Interesting)
you guessed it...
The Sun Grid, available for $1/cpu-hr...
Are you sure Slashdot isn't selling advertising space disguised as news items?
Re:Talk about irony... (Score:2)
Except for the constant dupes, most stories are now ads in one form or another.
How (Score:2)
Odd Currency Exchange (Score:5, Funny)
I feel a little wierd paying for my grid computing with venison.
It must just be me.
Re:Odd Currency Exchange (Score:2)
Re:Odd Currency Exchange (Score:2)
A billion years is unimaginable,
A billion stars is unfathomable,
But to Congress, a billion bucks is steak dinner for their contributors.
or was it:
A billion bucks here, a billion bucks there, pretty soon your talking about real meat!
Capitalism (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Odd Currency Exchange (Score:2)
How do you send medium sized animals via PayPal, though?
Re:Odd Currency Exchange (Score:3, Funny)
A: Beer nuts are $1.79. Deer nuts are under a buck.
Thank you, I'm here all week.
Like electricity (Score:2)
Another Way (Score:3, Interesting)
Mr Schwartz ran a demonstration of the service, showing how data could be processed in a protein folding experiment.
Of course, if your experiment is cool enough and academia-related, there are always other ways to get computing power. A similar chemistry experiment was performed using grid-computing in Canada, utilizing computing power from universities all across the country. http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~ciss/ [ualberta.ca]
Now, granted this wouldn't be applicable to a lot of businesses, which is Sun's target audience. But the CISS project has a cooler name
I wonder how much to render a Pixar flick... (Score:5, Interesting)
For all those who keep asking about cost-effectiveness... don't forget that when you rent from a utility grid, you don't have to worry about obsolescence - it's someone else's problems. You're not throwing out a bunch of P3s because P4s are available and better price/performance when the second project comes along. Renting CPU time is an operating expense. Running your own compute grid is both an operating and a capital expense.
To paraphrase Atari: Do the math. (Score:2)
That's for a dual processor box t
Re:I wonder how much to render a Pixar flick... (Score:2)
Unless you've gotten smarter (acquired intellectual capital) in which case you have to appraise and declare that, too!
Re:I wonder how much to render a Pixar flick... (Score:2)
Re:I wonder how much to render a Pixar flick... (Score:2)
Crandall claims that A Bug's Life was about ten times that. [wired.com]
Sliding pricing scale? (Score:2)
Re:I wonder how much to render a Pixar flick... (Score:2)
Re:I wonder how much to render a Pixar flick... (Score:2)
Ya Think??! (Score:2, Interesting)
I love how a good deal of the slashdot community are supporters of open software and standards.. and yet every day that I read a story on slashdot, about how so and so country / state / organization is implementing foss, right SMACK in the middle of the page is an add from MS on the "Facts" about TCO for Windows vs Linux.. or "Facts" about Performance..
Should be "News for Nerds, Irony that matters.."
It's too expensive. (Score:4, Insightful)
So unless I need my results very soon after posing the problem, I'm better off spending $500 bucks on a PC and running my problem for 20 days than I am buying 500 CPU-hours from Sun and getting the answer back very quickly.
But Sun must have to schedule their system - and you have to go through the grief of sending your program to them, getting it to work on their grid, paying for it, etc, etc. So you know it's not going to be available on-demand, *instantly* - so you might have to wait several hours before they can schedule your task. This facility is only going to be useful for things that would take an eternity to run on a single PC.
Even if I need the results quickly, unless this is a one-time problem, I'd be better off buying a pile of cheap PC's than using Sun's facility. If I need to run a 100 CPU/hour problem often, I can justify buying a $10,000 20 PC cluster for just 100 runs.
Bun if Sun's niche is big problems whose results are needed quickly *AND* which are not run frequently - then there is still a problem because you just know it's going to be quite a bit of grief to get your code ported over to Solaris (or whatever they are running) - to get your data onto their disk drives - to get the results back. If you only run this program once - then that overhead will kill you - and you'd *still* be better off buying your own systems.
FWIW: IBM offer a very similar service - with very similar problems over pricing.
Re:It's too expensive. (Score:5, Informative)
This is what I've seen of people doing research type work. The researchers will have a smaller cluster always available to then (2 to 16 node setup), that they use for all their initial development of the application. But when they need to run the program for real, doing their full calculation, they would farm it out to some big system like NERSC. The scheduling systems these kinda of systems have tend to do a really good job at scheduling workloads, and the wait tends to be minimal.
I think this is a good idea for companies that don't want to build their own grid. The cost of the computers might not be a lot, but if you have an application that requires a lot of communication between systems, you need a really good interconnect system (such as InfiniBand [slashdot.org]) cost a lot of money to setup. You could spend as much on a good interconnect system as you do on all your computers, if not more.
Re:It's too expensive. (Score:2)
http://www.nersc.gov/ [nersc.gov]
http://www.intel.com/technology/infiniband/ [intel.com]
Re:It's too expensive. (Score:2)
You haven't factored in fast networking (IB, Myrinet, good GigE, switches), maintainence, space, electricity, A/C, security, storage, backup, manhours. Clusters generally use Xeon/Opteron/Itanium, wondered why?
Re:It's too expensive. (Score:2)
"It's too expensive."
You aren't their target customer.
Re:It's too expensive. (Score:2)
or maybe you are doing a complex mathematical problem that needs to store lots of intermediate steps in memory. even if you don't care about how long it takes to run, there are some applications that will never run on cheap p3's even if you give them until the end of time.
that's the m
If you can't sell it, rent it (Score:4, Funny)
It's funny how old ideas become new again though...Is Jonathon Schwartz/Sun trying to become the new Ross Perot/EDS?
Re:If you can't sell it, rent it (Score:5, Insightful)
That sounds about right. Scientific time sharing hasn't been a good business model since 1980. If you need heavy compute power, you get your own cluster. If there was a viable business model in this space, hosting companies would be selling this as a service. They already have the right infrastructure.
For a while, it looked like commercial render farms [respower.com] might be a viable business. But today's stats at ResPower read "Running frames: 3, Waiting frames 0", so only 3 of their 500+ computers are active right now.
The "use spare cycles on other people's PCs" model works fine, if you're a spammer or an adware/spyware company. But nobody seems to be paying out money to home users for spare cycles.
Re:If you can't sell it, rent it (Score:2)
Not quite, as they aren't running an N1 Grid like Sun is. From what their web site says, I estimate they are running a Grid Engine allocating out to Containers on their servers. That means you can rent as much or as little of their servers as you need, and receive complete isolation from other people's tasks.
Sun offers energy by the hour (Score:5, Funny)
The Sun has launched a pay-as-you-go service which will allow customers requiring huge solar power to rent it by the hour.
Solar power costs users $1 (53p) for an hour's worth of light and heating power on land covered by Sun.
So-called fusion reaction is the latest buzz phrase in a solar system which believes that solar energy is as important a commodity as hardware and software.
The Sun likened fusion reactions to the development of electricity.
'Buck an hour'
The system could mature in the same way utilities such as electricity and water have developed, said the Sun.
"Why generate your own power when you can use ours for a buck an hour?" he asked in an address launching Sun's quarterly solar eclipse event in the center of the Solar System.
The star will have to persuade the entire galaxy to adopt a new model but it said it already had interest from planets in the milkyway, andromeda and B53 stellar clusters.
Some of them want to book capacity of more than 5,000 TeraWatts each, Sun said.
Mr Sun ran a demonstration of the service, showing how fusion could be performed on elements.
Hundreds of atoms were fused simultaneously, generating energy for a few seconds each.
Sigh....too much time and an agile mind.
What is THE CPU ? (Score:2, Insightful)
This is so retro! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is so retro! (Score:2)
What's with all the stock pictures? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think that BBC should stop using stock images if they don't actually have images that pretain to the story. I mean, this isn't some high school jornalism class.
Re:What's with all the stock pictures? (Score:2)
I expect to sink full TTL loads on my $1 / hour / chip grid, none of this low power schottky crap, thank you very much.
Not a bargain compared to colocation prices (Score:2)
Bruce
Re:Not a bargain compared to colocation prices (Score:3, Insightful)
Sun could double or triple or whatever your CPU/storage allocation in a moments notice and your bill scales linearly. Their system is completely virtualized.
Buzzword++ (Score:2)
2. Add a Buzzword and slap "NEW" on it.
3. Press release bonaza!
4. Profit?
Cool... (Score:2)
An Internet beowulf (Score:2, Interesting)
Imagine playing Doom 3 on a P-II, with the graphics being rendered by an Athlon64 somewhere in the Internet.
Now that many computers are connected to the Internet with fast DSL connections, it would be very beneficial for all if someone could start such a project.
The basic software already exists and it is in the public domain: MPI [anl.gov].
I explain this idea in more detail on my blog [wikinerds.org].
Re:An Internet beowulf (Score:2)
And interactive real-time rendering in a game definitely isn't one of those, to even get a compressed video at 720x480 resolution, compressed, (DVD Video) you need
Re:An Internet beowulf (Score:2)
Do you think a company with a dataset full of trade secrets would run their job on your Internet P2P Beowulf cluster?
Time-sharing is new(s)? (Score:2)
Prof said.. (Score:2)
"Today, by comparison, it's essentially free" he said.
One dollar per hour, Jesus. (Score:4, Interesting)
I can remember blowing $200 per minute on the Univac 1108 at Georgia Tech, when my program got into an infinite loop.
Its not just what the boxes cost (Score:2, Informative)
The current big users of this are financial institutions running monte carlo analysis of stock and commodities markets - they use thousands of CPUs at a time, every day.
The other nice feature to this, is you get glass-house data center capability, but can turn it off, which is not as easy with your own lease agreements, et
Yet another clueless marketing abuse of Grid (Score:3, Insightful)
Now what IBM has been doing is not Grid. You basically rent a machine for a certain amount of time. You actually start with a small test cluster, then when it works, your "image" is then transfered to the real thing.
Grids are designed so that everything you need for your code is on the grid you are using (including data). On-demand is renting cycles.
Nice try, but this market's established already. (Score:2)
Doubt it is completely sustainable... (Score:2)
is the article I read
I don't think 'betting the farm' on on-demand computing is a good idea for sun. The market is there and has money, but I don't think a company like Sun can sustain itself on almost exclusively this.
IBM does this with their servers, but if they didn't have a bunch of customers also buying the systems whole working to help subsidize research and development of the servers, not to mention manufacturing the systems in volume, the reven
Unanswered questions (Score:2)
How much RAM per process?
How much connectivity between systems? (Gigabit switch per rack? Better?)
How many available disk space, and how fast can it be accessed?
And, of course, how *fast* are the CPUs?
I'd want a LOT more info before I even considered using that service, and I just can't find where the info is listed.
Not clip-art (Score:2)
Security (Score:2)
Re:Ad before stories? (Score:2)
Re:A possible use in combatting spam (Score:2)
Re:My question - what kind of processor (Score:2)
Re:Portability - Mobility (Score:2)
but it can be "test driven" for literally any budget, to the dollar... can pay a minimal fee (like a dollar) to install its "spec test" code on each available grid
I'll believe that when I see it. I imagine everyone else here who has dealt with Sun before is thinking the same thing. "Hello Sun, anybody there, I want to spend 5K on a workstation. Will anybody sell it to me? Anyone? Call me back? Are you guys awake?"
Maybe they have gotten better over the years, but for those of us who had trouble maki
Re:Portability - Mobility (Score:2)
I've made small purchases from Sun a few times (less than $100, even). Use their website. It's just like any other mail order business like CDW.
Re:Portability - Mobility (Score:2)
It has been years since I purchased anything from Sun, but at the time you could not purchase directly from the website. It would not even tell you the price of a workstation, only connect you to a sales agent who would haggle with you when he got around to it. Given the fact that this service will probably require personal interaction, I fear it will be just as bad. Maybe it will not. Maybe they will even have it all nicely automated. We shall see.
Re:Computing power as a commodity? (Score:2)
This is yet another extension of the old standby slogan "The Network is the Computer." You push your data out onto the network (utility grid) and get your results back.
Re:grid computing (Score:2)
If by stupid you mean 'cost effective', 'scalable' and 'provide a high return-on-investment' then yes, you're completely correct.
Computing resources are cheap; it's managing them and setting them up that is expensive. Dedicated machines are cheaper to manage and easier to set up than grids of under-utilized computers.
You're right about the up-front cost of the hardware being the smallest expenditure over the lifetime of the machines. The bigg