Sun Grid Compute Utility Opens for Public Business

Published: March 28, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you have a buck you want to kill for an hour, you have a reasonably clean background, and you have some applications lying around that you want to run on a compute utility, Sun Microsystems has finally opened the public portal into its Sun Grid compute utility. Now, people with a PayPal account who can pass a background check that is similar to that used routinely on all other kinds of online purchases, can log into the Sun Grid and have their way with it.

According to Aisling MacRunnels, senior director of utility computing, this is the third generation of architecture for the Sun Grid, and Sun has taken some time and used its commercial utility customers, who essentially have been hogging the Sun Grid for the past year, to learn how to make the compute utility more flexible and more secure. Those commercial customers bought up huge time slices on large numbers of processors--hundred or thousands--so they could test how the idea of utility computing might be useful in offloading some of their number-crunching jobs. These commercial utility customers also got to negotiate volume pricing agreements, which essentially cut the cost of processing cycles in half.

But, with the public portal being announced last week, there is no long-term commitment, and hence, no haggling about the price. "There's no sales rep, and we are not negotiating, so the price is fixed at $1 per CPU per hour," says MacRunnels. "People are talking about software as a service. This is computing as a service, and no one else is doing this." Sun's commercial clients typically need days to activate an account on the Sun Grid. This is supposed to take an hour or less, depending on how that background check goes.

Think of it as the Zipless FLOPS--those of you who remember Erica Jong and "Fear of Flying" know what I am talking about--and you have the right idea. We're back to the 1970s not only in terms of time-sharing computers, but also with a carefree attitude and a lack of responsibility of sorts. You don't have to make a capital investment. You just log on, pay the bill, get clearance, run your job, and walk away.

While the idea of slamming together a few thousand processors and making a utility-style compute farm may sound pretty easy, there are a lot of non-obvious things you need to think about--and MacRunnels is not about to go through all of them to help competitors. But all of the big banks and financial firms that hogged time on the Sun Grid's Compute Utility for the past year were concerned about security and testing how their grid-enabled applications would run. Sun spent a lot of time challenging its own hackers to try to break in, and initially, they found some holes. Now that it is rock-solid, Sun feels confident that it can open the Compute Utility to the public in the United States, using resources located at data centers it runs in Virginia and New Jersey.

Sun has also been experimenting with the so-called "pod size" that customers can buy, which is the increment of processors that Sun's grid management tools think in to allocate processors. Initially, Sun chose a pod size of around 1,000 CPUs, but this meant that when someone bought 200 CPUs of time, another 800 CPUs were essentially humming along, doing no useful work. With the third iteration of the Compute Utility, the pod size is now 32 CPUs, which is a number based on the typical usage that Sun has seen over the past year. You might be thinking, why not just make the pod size a single CPU? Well, Sun is working on that. But finer granularity requires more frequent allocation of processors, which takes time, and time is money. "We want to get the pod size down to the point where we can partition down to a single box," explains MacRunnels.

Sun has lined up over 60 software vendors who are endorsing the Sun Grid and have either moved or are in the process of moving their applications to it. And the word on the street for the past few months is that Sun has thousands of customers lined up to give the utility a try. Most of those applications are for hefty number-crunching jobs relating to computer-aided design and molecular modeling, the kinds of applications that academic institutions and companies typically run on their own Unix or Linux clusters.

While the Sun Grid has been an interesting alternative for large companies who might want to offload some of their workloads--such as the Monte Carlo analysis used to assess risk in investment portfolios, which doesn't have any account information in it and is therefore not a big risk for a financial institution to let out on the other side of its firewalls--the Sun Grid is not supposed to be the utility that they use, but rather the utility that is the prototype for the ones that Sun expects its partners to build. The Sun Grid is also supposed to be available for ISVs to use for free to grid-enable their applications and for independent developers to do the same. And, perhaps more significantly in the long run, it is supposed to be a place where individuals can buy capacity to run early iterations of financial or molecular models or product designs so they can more quickly refine their designs--and do so earlier than and more frequently than they would if they had to allocate funds to build their own cluster of servers or get their chief financial officers down the hall to do it.

Sun has been allocating 100 hours of free capacity on the utility to developers and has given away 100,000 CPU hour endowments to various universities, including Princeton University, to test the Sun Grid out, and announced that 10 universities--including SUNY Binghamton, Clemson, MIT, Rutgers, UC Santa Cruz, University of Minnesota, and University of Wisconsin--have been given grants of 100,000 CPU hours. This is not just Sun being nice. Sun wants the next generation of hot coders to use the utility, and seed the market for the companies that will ultimately build the much larger--and money making--compute utilities.

The compute grid is located at www.network.com, and is only available for customers located in the United States. Over the next few months, Sun will hammer out the details on how it plans to extend the Sun Grid into international markets. It will be interesting to see what end users--who can be anybody--will do with such capacity, and it will also be interesting to see what governments do to regulate such mammoth processing capacity, which can be used to do great good or great harm.