Sun Cloud

Sun Cloud is an on-demand Cloud computing service operated by Sun Microsystems, a subsidiary of Oracle Corporation. The Sun Cloud Compute Utility provides access to a substantial computing resource over the Internet for US$1 per CPU-hour. It is based on and supports open source technologies such as Solaris 10, Sun Grid Engine, and the Java platform.

Sun Cloud 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 Sun Cloud is available worldwide. Since Sunday, March 7, 2010, the network.com web site has been inaccessible.

Suitable applications

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

• must be self-contained
• runs on the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS)
• is implemented with standard object libraries included with the Solaris 10 OS or user libraries packaged with the executable
  • all executable code must be available on the Compute Utility at time of execution
• runs to completion under control of shell scripts (no requirement for interactive access)
• has a total maximum size of applications and data that does not exceed 10 gigabytes
• can be packaged for upload to Sun Cloud as one or more ZIP files of 300 megabytes or smaller

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 Cloud 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 Cloud Compute Utility. Runs occur when the job is submitted to the Compute Utility for execution.

CPU-hour

For each job one submits and runs on the Cloud, the Sun Cloud 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.

The Application Catalog

On March 13, 2007, Sun announced the launch of Application Catalog, 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.^{[citation needed]}

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-based Cloud 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.

Available Applications

Applications available on the Catalog include(by category):

• General - Blender, FDS
• Computer Aided Engineering - Calculix, deal.II, Elmer Solver, Impact, FreeFEM, OFELI
• Life Sciences - BLAST, FASTA, GROMACS, Clustalw, eHITS, T-Coffee, fastDNAml, READSEQ

Examples of types of suitable applications include:

• Bio informatics
• Financial domain applications, like Monte Carlo method, Black-Scholes option pricing models
• Computer Arts, like Fractal landscape generation
• Speech synthesis applications, like Festival
• Scientific applications, like Computer simulation

See also

• Big Buck Bunny - an open content animated film rendered on Sun Cloud ^{[1] [2]}
• Utility computing

References

1. ^ "Sun's Network.com Renders Computer-Animated Movie "Big Buck Bunny"". Sun Microsystems. http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-06/sunflash.20080602.1.xml. Retrieved 2008-06-22. 
2. ^ "The Renderfarm (how it works)". Blender Foundation. http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/our-renderfarm-and-how-it-works/. Retrieved 2008-06-22. 

External links

• Sun Cloud
• Utility Computing
• Sun Grid Engine Source
• Sun Grid Module Suite for NetBeans IDE