[CAnet - news] Low cost grids for research and business

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 [Many researchers and business are looking to purchase small clusters or
deploy grids for their high end applications. For many organizations this is
causing quite a strain on existing infrastructure in terms of power
consumption and air conditioning load, especially when multiple departments
may be independently purchasing their own clusters.  For those who only need
a small cluster a better solution may be the soon to be announced Amazon EC2
service or the Windows Grid solution "Alchemi" developed at Melbourne
University by Dr. Rajkumar Buyya's team.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides
resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale
computing easier for developers. Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service
(Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables "compute" in
the cloud.  Because the EC2 service is a web service it could be easily
coupled through workflow to a user's application. For example if a user had
developed a proprietary computation model - they could offer the model as a
web service to prospective customers or other third parties who then use EC2
as the computational engine.

As Gary Finely of Westgrid pointed out: "EC2 is pretty amazingly cheap too.
Their $2/hr for a 20-node cluster is microscopic compared to the capital and
personnel costs that a research group would pay for 20 machines.  Probably
about covers their AC power bill. I would think that academics at
institutions too small to build and maintain their own computer  
clusters would find this of real value.   However, I note that Sun  
was running a similar CPU-on-demand service last year, and as far as  
I know it withered away from lack of market interest."

The other low cost alternative grid technology was developed by Dr. Rajkumar
Buyya at Melbourne University called Alchemi. Alchemi is a "SETI-like" grid
tooll built as an open source software framework that allows you to
painlessly aggregate the computing power of Windows networked machines into
a virtual supercomputer (desktop grid) and to develop applications to run on
the grid.  It is built on the Microsoft .Net platform. Thanks to Richard
Ackerman, Gary Finley and  Raj Buyya for these pointers--BSA]

For information on Alchemi:

http://www.alchemi.net/


For information on Amazon EC2:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=201590011



Pricing

    * Pay only for what you use.
    * $0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed).
    * $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., Internet
traffic).
    * $0.15 per GB-Month of Amazon S3 storage used for your images (charged
by Amazon S3).

Data transferred within the Amazon EC2 environment, or between Amazon EC2
and Amazon S3, is free of charge (i.e., $0.00 per GB).

via Slashdot http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/24/1555250




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These news items and comments are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect
those  of the CANARIE board or management.

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