Sun Grid

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Sun Grid is an on-demand grid computing service operated by Sun Microsystems. The Sun Grid Compute Utility at Network.com provides easy and affordable access to an enormous computing resource over the Internet for the predictable and all-inclusive price of US$1 per CPU-hour. It supports open-source technologies such as Solaris 10, Grid Engine, and the Java platform.

Sun Grid delivers enterprise computing power and resources over the Internet, enabling developers, researchers, scientists and businesses to optimize performance, speed time to results, and accelerate innovation without investment in IT infrastructure.

The foundation of the Sun Grid Compute Utility is the Sun Grid Engine which is open-source.

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[edit] Suitable Applications

A typical application that can run on the Compute Utility fits the following parameters

  • Application must be self-contained.
  • Application runs on Solaris 10 Operating System.
  • Is implemented with standard object libraries included with Solaris 10 OS or user libraries packaged with the executable. All executable code must be available on the Compute Utility at time of execution.
  • The application runs to completion under control of shell scripts without a requirement for interactive access.
  • Has a total maximum size of applications and data that does not exceed 10Gbytes.
  • Can be packaged for upload to Sun Grid as one or more Zip files of 300MB or smaller.

[edit] Resources, Jobs and Runs

Resources are collections of files that contain the user's data and executable.

Jobs are a Compute Utility concept that define the elements of the unit of work that is submitted to the Sun Grid Compute Utility. The major elements of a job include the name of the shell script controlling program execution, required arguments to the shell script, and a list of resources that must be in place for the job to run.

A run is a specific instantiation of a Job description submitted to the Sun Grid Compute Utility. Runs occur when the job is submitted to the Compute Utility for execution.

[edit] What is a CPU-hr?

For each job one submits and runs on the grid, the Sun Grid CPU usage is aggregated and then rounded up to the nearest whole hour. For example, if a job used 1000 CPUs for one minute, it would be aggregated as 1000 CPU minutes or 16.67 CPU hours. The software rounds this up to 17 hours and the job would be billed as US $17.

[edit] The Application Catalog

On March 13th, 2007, Sun Microsystems announced the launch of Application Catalog on Network.com , an online service that allows developers and ISVs to develop and publish their applications, enabling communities of scientists and academics in life sciences, education, engineering, and other fields to accelerate innovation and complete research projects quickly and less expensively.

The Network.com Application Catalog gives users immediate online access to popular ISV and open source applications through an easy-to-use Web portal with no contractual obligation. Users can upload and run their own applications and create a personal library of favorites or take advantage of the pre-installed and configured applications giving them instant productivity. The portal gives them everything they need to conduct analysis and complete complex computational tasks to help speed scientific discovery and shorten the time to market for new products. They simply select the application, upload their data, and get results fast.

Network.com enables anyone to publish applications to the Application Catalog and take advantage of the powerful Solaris 10 OS-based grid platform. Users can publish their own applications to a private library and access them whenever they want; they can also share their applications with others while retaining their data securely in their private space.

[edit] Available Applications

Applications available on the Catalog include(by category):


Examples of types of suitable applications include:

[edit] See also

[edit] External links