[Beowulf] Utility Supercomputing...

[James Cuff]

On Sun, Mar 3, 2013 at 12:31 PM, Mark Hahn <hahn at mcmaster.ca> wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm guessing the answer is that your market is mainly people who are too
>>> self-important (anything health- or finance-related) to do it themselves
>>> (or join a coop/consortium), or else people just getting their toes wet.
>
>
> James, FWIW, I regret that this was unnecessarily personal.

No worries, I'm a big boy - have been doing this for a long old while,
passion and commitment often confused as being "personal", I've done
it myself, probably way too many times :-)  As you can imagine having
a direct pop at our customers was clearly on the other side of
suspect, appreciate you, and not me pointing it out.  Many thanks!

Let's move on, no point crying over spilled milk, there is too much
good science to discuss!

> but the particular Cyclecomputing case study is particularly interesting
> because the effective cost is very near, perhaps a bit better, than what a large-scale,
> competent HPC organization could do by building from scratch.
> kudos to Cyclecomputing and Amazon!

:-)  Thanks Mark - appreciate it.  The "sauce" is about managing
configuration, cost and effectiveness, we even sometimes think we are
competent :-) hehehe.

> hence the question about dynamics of spot pricing.

You are right, we are not even close to being done with pricing yet.
Each and every day we see a new shift in IaaS, PaaS, SaaS pricing
structures, it is getting to be near impossible to keep up!

Here is one more random and recent example:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/21/google_opaque_support_pricing/

I'm not going to go into any detail, other than to say that it sure
looks like it is going to be a very exciting time for everyone in the
$/cpu/TB/GB/s game moving forward!

Best,

j.