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Sun lights up its Grid

Michael Kanellos CNET News.com

Published: 02 Feb 2005 09:25 GMT

With its new Sun Grid, Sun hopes bioscientists and geologists will buy computing cycles over the Web just like people buy tickets online or search for things via Google.

Sun executives flipped on Sun Grid, a large pay-as-you-go computing grid, at company headquarters Tuesday and discussed how grid computing will transform the computing world the way electrical utilities changed how electricity gets bought.

In the Sun Grid, consumers pay $1 for each CPU-hour and then run their computing problems on a bank of servers and storage systems owned and maintained by Sun.

Multiple servers, and thus multiple CPUs, are used simultaneously to solve these problems. In a demonstration, Sun chief operating officer Jonathan Schwartz submitted a project to the Sun Grid -- graphically rendering data from a protein folding experiment. It took only a few seconds, but cost $12. The 12 hours of CPU time for which Schwartz was billed was consumed by hundreds of machines simultaneously clicking away at the rendering problem for a few seconds each.

"The issue is whether you can convince a data centre employee or a data centre executive to use a different model," Schwartz said. Wall Street, pharmaceutical companies, and oil and gas companies will be early target customers.

Schwartz likened the development of grid computing to how electricity developed, citing the book "Empires of Light." A century ago, only private individuals like JP Morgan had electricity in their homes, and they had to hire private electricians. The increased infrastructure, along with standards such as the three-prong plug, helped electricity proliferate.

"There are a lot of grids out there. The water grid, the power grid, and my favourite, the sewer grid," said CEO Scott McNealy.

How do they pay for it?
Sun wouldn't say how much it would cost to build the grid, but executives maintained that it will be profitable.

One advantage Sun claims it will have in this effort is that it makes most of the materials required to erect a grid. Sun owns Solaris, so it doesn't have to buy software or worry about indemnity, Schwartz said.