In an effort to attract developer attention, Sun is offering $50,000 in prizes in its Sun Grid developer contest. The contest will run until the end of August, and will be awarded in two application categories: Those that run on Sun's grid computing facility, and those that make use of the company’s grid-aware NetBeans plugin.

Sun Grid represents a new frontier in the company's quest to convince the world that the network, indeed, is the computer, according Sun Grid product line manager David Folk. Artima spoke with Folk and Rohit Valia, Sun Grid's group product manager, via telephone in May of this year.

While grid computing is a favorite buzzword, Folk admits that there is still a fair amount of misunderstanding about grid computing, and how grids can benefit an enterprise. He noted that grids currently offer the biggest benefit with batch applications. "When you have computing jobs that take a very long time to run, you can speed up that job by taking advantage of many CPUs working [on that job] in parallel," noted Folk, adding that the Sun Grid can lend its 5,000 CPUs to such jobs.

"Many companies are realizing the benefit of grid computing, and are building their own grids to apply to their [computing] problems," adds Sun Grid product manager Valia. However, those grids are used only periodically—for instance, at the end of a day to close out trading positions or to run inventory analysis or some other compute-intensive jobs.

Whether to build or rent a grid "is a question of return on investment. You have to ask if your competency is a specialization in [building] a grid, and if [building a grid] is a good way to invest your R&D dollars." If not, then your organization can rent portions of the Sun Grid for the time you need to use those extra compute resources. Current Sun Grid customers include businesses that perform risk analysis, image rendering, manufacturing design, simulation, DNA sequencing, as well as from the scientific and academic communities, according to Valia.

Computing cycles on the Sun Grid can be purchased at the cost of one dollar per CPU-hour. The Sun Grid's accounting system is able to keep track of how much CPU time a customer's job utilized, and bill the user accordingly. Interaction with the Sun Grid takes place through a Web page at http://www.network.com.

After providing a credit card number for billing, a user can upload a batch job as a single compressed archive. The archive must contain a script file that tells the Sun Grid how to execute the job. Once that archive is uploaded to the Sun Grid, the user can initiate the batch job via a browser interface. The results, which may be available from anywhere from a few minutes to a several days, will be delivered via email, or can also be downloaded from the Web interface.

Any job that can execute on Solaris 10 can run on the Sun Grid, and additional high-performance computing libraries are also provided. "You can think of [a Sun Grid task] as consisting of resources and jobs, " notes Valia. "You create a resource, and within that resource there is a shell script [that describes] how to run the job on the Sun Grid system. The job then executes on the Sun Grid, and you get email messages as the job progresses."

A Sun Grid job comes with a ten-gigabyte limit on the amount of data that can be uploaded. Since uploading large amounts of data can take significant time, jobs with a high computation-to-data ratio—jobs that perform lots of computations on relatively small amounts of data— work best on the Sun Grid. Sun’s Folk noted that significant engineering went into ensuring privacy on the Sun Grid. "A lot of care is taken to separate the identity [of a job’s submitter] from the job itself…. Every user is in their own virtual world on the Sun Grid."

With the developer contest, Sun hopes to jump-start a developer community around the Sun Grid. That community would provide open-source tools to make working with the Sun Grid easier. Sun itself provides several such tools, including a Jini-based compute server. Other community-contributed tools include libraries and utilities for bioinformatics programming, and as well as utilities that make development and deployment on the grid more convenient.

What do you think of Sun's rent-a-grid initiative? What kinds of applications could you use a 5,000-CPU grid for?