Sun’s Schwartz takes a page from the Microsoft playbook
I really like Jonathan Schwartz’s blog. I know that it’s a marketing tool, but it’s nice to think you know what he’s thinking…plus blogging is in vogue. I also think that Sun is a very forward thinking company.
Now utility computing is nothing new, but I was surprised when I listened to a September, 2003 talk by Jim Gray on IT Conversations. He and his team at Microsoft produced a paper, Distributed Computing Economics, on the cost of a distributed computing model. Here’s a clip. One of his conclusions is
Put the computation near the data . The recurrent theme of this analysis is that “On Demand” computing is only economical for very cpu-intensive (100,000 instructions per byte or a cpu-day -per gigabyte of network traffic) applications….
…If telecom prices drop faster than Moore’s law, the analysis fails. If telecom prices drop slower than Moore’s law, the analysis becomes stronger. Most of the argument in this paper pivots on the relatively high price of telecommunications. Over the last 40 years telecom prices have fallen much more slowly than any other information technology. If this situation changed, it could completely alter
the arguments here. But there is no obvious sign of that occurring.
So based on his recent N1 annoucement, is Jonathan Schwartz listening to Jim Gray? It seems that render farms would meet the instruction limits that Gray sets, but Wall Street? Has bandwidth dropped such that it is affordable for Wall Street to purchase CPU time by the hour? Should be interesting.
