Screening Room #4: The Sun grid compute utility

The April episode of The Screening Room explores the Sun Grid Compute Utility. Part one is a walkthrough of the portal where you buy CPU hours, upload jobs, and run them on Sun's grid for a dollar per CPU hour. When you see how quickly a distributed job can burn through CPU hours, you start to get a feeling for how this might make business sense. Although any Solaris program can run on the grid, the Compute Server project provides Java classes and NetBeans plugins that simplify the process of writing and running distributable Java programs.

A note on audio quality. This is the first screencast for which I've used my new Telos One digital hybrid, which enables me to separate my audio from the audio coming in on the phone line, and edit the two tracks separately. That's a really helpful technique which made last Friday's podcast more listenable than previous efforts. In this case, though, I couldn't exploit track separation because I forgot that Camtasia records in mono. I should have captured the audio in Audacity, or another stereo recording program, instead. Live and learn...

Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/05/01.html#a1439