Sun Grid
Encyclopedia
Sun Cloud is an on-demand Cloud computing
Cloud computing
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....

 service operated by Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...

, a subsidiary
Subsidiary
A subsidiary company, subsidiary, or daughter company is a company that is completely or partly owned and wholly controlled by another company that owns more than half of the subsidiary's stock. The subsidiary can be a company, corporation, or limited liability company. In some cases it is a...

 of Oracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems...

. The Sun Cloud Compute Utility provides access to a substantial computing resource over the Internet for US$
United States dollar
The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....

1 per CPU-hour. It is based on and supports open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 technologies such as Solaris 10, Sun Grid Engine
Sun Grid Engine
Oracle Grid Engine, previously known as Sun Grid Engine , previously known as CODINE or GRD , is an open source batch-queuing system, developed and supported by Sun Microsystems...

, and the Java
Java (Sun)
Java refers to several computer software products and specifications from Sun Microsystems, a subsidiary of Oracle Corporation, that together provide a system for developing application software and deploying it in a cross-platform environment...

 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.

In early 2010 Oracle announced it was discontinuing the Sun Cloud project.

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 gigabyte
    Gigabyte
    The gigabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage. The prefix giga means 109 in the International System of Units , therefore 1 gigabyte is...

    s
  • can be packaged for upload to Sun Cloud as one or more ZIP
    ZIP (file format)
    Zip is a file format used for data compression and archiving. A zip file contains one or more files that have been compressed, to reduce file size, or stored as is...

     files of 300 megabyte
    Megabyte
    The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage or transmission with two different values depending on context: bytes generally for computer memory; and one million bytes generally for computer storage. The IEEE Standards Board has decided that "Mega will mean 1 000...

    s 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
Shell script
A shell script is a script written for the shell, or command line interpreter, of an operating system. It is often considered a simple domain-specific programming language...

 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.

Application Catalog

On March 13, 2007, Sun announced the launch of Application Catalog, an online service that allows developers and ISV
Independent software vendor
Independent software vendor is a business term for companies specializing in making or selling software, designed for mass marketing or for niche markets...

s 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
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 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
    Blender (software)
    Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software product used for creating animated films, visual effects, interactive 3D applications or video games. The current release version is 2.60, and was released on October 19, 2011...

    , FDS
  • Computer Aided Engineering - Calculix
    Calculix
    Calculix is a free and open source finite element analysis application that uses a similar input format to ABAQUS. It has an implicit and explicit solver written by Guido Dhondt and a pre and post processor written by Klaus Wittig. The original software was written for the Linux operating system...

    , deal.II, Elmer Solver, Impact
    Impact Finite Element Program
    ' is an open source finite element program suite which can be used to predict most dynamic events such as car crashes or metal sheet punch operations. They usually involve large deformations and high velocities. It is written in Java....

    , FreeFEM, OFELI
  • Life Sciences
    Life sciences
    The life sciences comprise the fields of science that involve the scientific study of living organisms, like plants, animals, and human beings. While biology remains the centerpiece of the life sciences, technological advances in molecular biology and biotechnology have led to a burgeoning of...

     - BLAST
    BLAST
    In bioinformatics, Basic Local Alignment Search Tool, or BLAST, is an algorithm for comparing primary biological sequence information, such as the amino-acid sequences of different proteins or the nucleotides of DNA sequences...

    , FASTA
    FASTA
    FASTA is a DNA and protein sequence alignment software package first described by David J. Lipman and William R. Pearson in 1985. Its legacy is the FASTA format which is now ubiquitous in bioinformatics.- History :...

    , GROMACS, Clustalw, eHITS, T-Coffee
    T-Coffee
    T-Coffee is a multiple sequence alignment software using a progressive approach. It generates a library of pairwise alignments to guide the multiple sequence alignment...

    , fastDNAml, READSEQ


Examples of types of suitable applications include:
  • Bio informatics
  • Financial domain applications, like Monte Carlo method
    Monte Carlo method
    Monte Carlo methods are a class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to compute their results. Monte Carlo methods are often used in computer simulations of physical and mathematical systems...

    , Black–Scholes option pricing models
  • Computer Arts, like Fractal
    Fractal
    A fractal has been defined as "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is a reduced-size copy of the whole," a property called self-similarity...

     landscape generation
  • Speech synthesis applications, like Festival
  • Scientific applications, like Computer simulation
    Computer simulation
    A computer simulation, a computer model, or a computational model is a computer program, or network of computers, that attempts to simulate an abstract model of a particular system...


See also

  • Big Buck Bunny
    Big Buck Bunny
    Big Buck Bunny is a short computer animated film by the Blender Institute, part of the Blender Foundation.Like the foundation's previous film Elephants Dream, the film was made using Blender, a free software application for animation made by the same foundation.-Overview:Work began in October 2007...

     - an open content
    Open content
    Open content or OpenContent is a neologism coined by David Wiley in 1998 which describes a creative work that others can copy or modify. The term evokes open source, which is a related concept in software....

     animated film rendered on Sun Cloud
  • Utility computing
    Utility computing
    Utility computing is the packaging of computing resources, such as computation, storage and services, as a metered service similar to a traditional public utility...


External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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