* Sun finally able to flick the switch on its Sun Grid
Despite a denial-of-service attack on its first day of operation, Sun last week launched its much-ballyhooed utility grid.
The Sun Grid Compute Utility allows users in the U.S. to buy computing power for $1 per CPU hour and users can pay for use over the Internet with PayPal.
The company had installed Cepstral’s text-to-speech application to let users try out the service, but service was struck by a denial-of-service attack on its first day, forcing Sun to move the application so that it can only be accessed by Sun Grid registered users.
Sun Grid was originally announced in February last year, but delays occurred in getting it in operational shape.
The grid consists of 5,000 Opteron or SPARC-based computers located in data center at New Jersey and Virginia. It runs Solaris 10 and the Sun N1 Grid Engine 6 software. Users access the grid via a Web portal over IP. Customers who sign up for use of the grid receive 10G-bytes of storage capacity.
The company claims it has several enterprise size customers that are using the grid. Among them are CDO2, which uses it to run financial simulations, and Applied BioSystems, who uses it for data research. Sun also donated 100,000 hours on the grid to Princeton University to boost its astrophysics research. Sun also donated 1 million hours to 10 other universities.
Sun will expand the grid to the U.K. in the next six months. The company expects the service to be profitable within the year.
The pilot release of the compute utility is located here.
