Buying Cluster/Grid/Cloud Time?

Question

I've used clusters in industrial and academic settings, but they were owned by the organizations I worked for. I've never purchased time from a company that sells cluster/cloud/grid time.

Suppose I want to run some compute intensive program like as a large simulation or a data mining application. Or maybe I want to optimize a complete build of a large product suite by running a distributed build on outsourced infrastructure. Where would I purchase cluster time to run such programs?

I'm interested in learning about clusters that run popular OS platforms like Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, and Windows.

Obviously, there is the build-your-own-cluster solution using the fast, cheap hardware available these days, but I'm specifically interested in an outsourced solution.

Answer 1

You might want to check out Amazon's EC2 service:

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

Some people have already done some work in regards to clustering with EC2:

http://www.google.com/search?q=cluster+computing+amazon+ec2&rls=com.microsoft:*&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1

Additionally, Microsoft has offered Windows Azure, which has native hooks for .NET, allows you to run anything, really (Java, php), given that you are able to load a runtime and code from storage (or deployed with your app, but that has it's own set of pros/cons).

Answer 2

The site is undergoing updates at the moment but I know Sun operate such a service http://www.network.com/, its been a while since I looked at it but if I remember correctly it was quite well priced with lots of options.
I am currently using a cluster for my final year university project which has 496 cores, fortunately don't have to pay to use it :).

Answer 3

Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud is very interesting. You pay for what you use (Memory, CPU, Persisted storage) many OS options.

Answer 4

I'm currently really interested in Azure Cloud Computing technology by Microsoft (to be released this year) that features .NET support.

Additionally there are:

• Google App Engine - Python framework by Google
• Cloud vService - by VMWare
• Amazon Web Services

Answer 5

There is a new service called Amazon Elastic MapReduce which runs on top of EC2 cluster. It has APIs in many of the programming languages including Ruby and PHP. Also, if you need more established service, checkout GreenPlum