Bladewatch.com

http://www.whereco.com/wp/?p=16

I went to our Unix users group meeting this week. They had a speaker from IBM discussing their new Deep Computing Capacity on Demand (DCCOD) service.

A lot of companies need a lot of cycles, but they either can’t or don’t want to build out a big enough IT infrastructure to handle it. Grid computing is becoming a big thing these days — many highly compute-intensive programs can split apart their computations amongst a set of machines and then combine the individual results for a final result. An example of this is in the financial arena. Alll of those Monte Carlo simulations to assess trades, positions, and portfolios are very compute-intensive… and also very distributable.

To do big-time grid computing you need a big-time grid. It’s a lot of machines to house, cool, monitor, maintain – a big investment in hardware, personnel, and space. Very expensive to build out. So, along comes IBM (and many other companies, actually). They will provide the machines and cycles. As much or as little as you need, for whatever time periods you want. You can purchase cycles in monthly, weekly, daily, hourly time frames. You get a front-end machine that is yours to put your software on, and they will hook up the grids for you when you request it.

The article raises an interesting issue in terms of the cost of grid. You’ll find typically that compliance and IT security remain the drivers to stop banks/large companies sharing IT infrastructure, the thought that banka could share blade1 with bankb is a non starter. The industry is adapting to the need for compute on demand, whether it’s using more efficient infrastructure, or ways of providing the datacenter in future.

You often here the blade boys/grid girls stating that they have more blades than any other banks, isn’t it going to be the opposite soon? Those with the most blades are going to typically be using the most energy, generating the most carbon? Will Grid be the Range Rover of the IT world?

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.