(Q): Does Sun offer a service to help me port my applications to run on a grid? If not, do you have partners you can refer a prospect to who will do so?
Fay Salwen (A): Hi. The availability of services will depend on your situation. If you are an ISV and qualify, there is a program (called the Sun Grid Readiness Program) with a number of free services available to assist in porting your application. If not, you can still get some free 1:1 time with a Sun Grid Engineer who can help you port your application as part of the Gridathon program. There is also a developer community, where you can benefit from the experiences of others, who have gone through similar experiences. I would recommend that you send an email to sungrid-feedback@sun.com, and they can help to assess the best approach to meet your situation.

(Q): Are there any plans to simplify the process for running an application on the Sun Grid Compute Utility, i.e., aiding a less technical person in going through the steps in English?
Fay Salwen (A): Hi! I'm not sure what the complexity is that you are referring to. I have personally spoken to a number of non-technical people who were able to run applications on the Sun Grid Compute Utility without problems. It may be a problem of documentation. Please check the Quick Start guide (http://www.sun.com/service/sungrid/SunGridQuickStart.pdf) and see if that helps. If it still seems too complex, please share your thoughts. We're always looking for new ideas on how to simplify.

(Q): Can someone explain the teaser question? What does "right for you" mean?
Brian Chang (A): Thanks for the question, by "right for you," we simply mean that we meet your technical and business requirements based on your application profile and business needs.

(Q): In much the same way that salesforce.com has grown its ecosystem of software providers with its Application Exchange; does Sun intend to grow its own ecosystem on Sun Grid Compute Utility?
Kris Thorleifsson (A): Yes, Sun Grid is planning to grow it's ecosystem of software providers on Sun Grid. We're working with a number of ISVs who will host their software applications on Sun Grid and deliver them as a service to end users. This is a new feature in Sun Grid that is expected to be available in Q1 of 2007.

(Q): What do customers primarily use the Sun Grid Compute Utility for — peak capacity spikes or application testing or application execution?
Rohit Valia (A): The customers today are mostly using it as a way to off load certain types of applications entirely that are pretty self contained. That frees up their own infrastructure, freeing it up for other uses. Besides, in the target users, most don't have available internally, the kind of scale that Sun Grid provides.

(Q): We need to move large volumes of data for processing, the web interface is inadequate for most of our clients, flexibility for FTP etc?
David Folk (A): We're looking into a variety of techniques for data transfer including FTP, various web service technologies, etc. But we don't have a public timeline for releasing features to address this. I'm curious to hear more about your requirements. What works best for you — web service with WSDL or REST, a client-side Java library that encapsulates data transfer, a client side executable, etc.? Please let us know more at sungrid-feedback@sun.com.

(Q): Is there any flexibility on moving data in/out of the Grid apart from the web interface?
David Folk (A): At this point, the only way to interact with the Sun Grid Compute Utility is through the web user interface.

(Q): Thanks Curt, how about message passing for Java, there are a few libraries that exist to support message passing in Java, and I guess it entirely possible that these could be run on the grid right now, but would require significant user knowledge. With Sun always being Pro-Java and Pro-Grid, do you know if Sun will be promoting more heavily Java on Grid development, I know of the NetBeans ComputeServer plugin, but currently that only supports divide and conquer style applications?
Curt Harpold (A): We have been looking at the Java message passing libraries, and they all seem to be in a pretty early stage of development. Before adding support for a new message passing library, we will need to spend some time assessing security risks to other jobs running within Sun Grid. If one of these libraries is important for the applications you are developing, please make a request for it, and also consider joining the developer.network.com community to help with the effort.

(Q): Can I submit my job with a script or using a web service?
Fay Salwen (A): You can upload a script to the Sun Grid, which when submitted to run, can then interface with the N1 Grid Engine (that is running inside the Sun Grid) to partition your workload and submit multiple other jobs. However, I suspect what you are really wondering is whether there is a programmatic interface to the Sun Grid that could be used instead of the web-based interface. The answer to that is that is unfortunately no, not at this time.

(Q): What are the minimum technical requirements to run an application on the Sun Grid?
David Folk (A): There's actually a FAQ on this very topic: http://www.sun.com/service/sungrid/faq.xml#q18 I'll add that if you're developing using the Java language take a look at the Compute Server project (http://computeserver.developer.network.com). I found this to be a great way to get a jump start developing in the NetBeans IDE.

(Q): Can I run a Linux application on the Sun Grid Compute Utility?
Curt Harpold (A): The current capabilities of Sun Grid only support binaries for Solaris 10 x64. The documentation includes instructions for building your own Sun Grid development environment (all using free software). Of course, if you're developing in Java, Perl, or another portable, nonbinary development environment, most applications will work even if they were developed under Linux.

(Q): Can a software developer use the Sun Grid Compute Utility to offer software as a service to its customer if its application runs on the grid?
Rohit Valia (A): Hi! We are getting ready to launch an application catalog as part of Sun Grid Compute Utility, where software developers can host and monetize their applications on a pay per use basis. At Grid World we announced the program and demonstrated an Early version of this. See, Sun Expands Efforts to Help ISVs Offer Applications to Solaris 10-Powered Sun Grid Compute Utility

(Q): I'm in the UK, can I access Network.com?
David Folk (A): I hear this question all the time. Currently, the answer is 'no', but *are* working on making the Sun Grid Compute Utility accessible outside of the US. Thanks for your patience!

(Q): Sun Grid Compute Utility has been around for over a year — what kind of users are using it? And what for?
Kris Thorleifsson (A): We have a number of customers that have allowed us to use their name publicly in customer success profiles (to be found here http://www.sun.com/service/grid/customertestimonials.xml). These examples provide a good idea of what type of jobs are being run on Sun Grid. In addition to these we have a number of scientists in various fields taking advantage of the Sun Grid. There are a number of early stage startups exploring Sun Grid as an infrastructure to satisfy their processing needs. We also have a growing community of developer who are tapping into the power of Sun Grid. (See some of these developer projects here https://www.developer.network.com/)

(Q): Are there any examples for developing for Sun Grid?
David Folk (A): Best place to start is Developer.Network.com. Take a look at the examples category. There you'll find several projects on a wide range of topics (RMI, getting started, and so on). The Cool Apps contest winners also had a few pretty interesting projects worth checking out. If you need a specific example, I suggest you post to one of the community aliases. We're always looking for suggestions. Also, there are several example examples at the end of the Developer's Guide (http://www.sun.com/service/sungrid/SunGridDevelopersGuide.pdf). Finally, just to avoid any confusion down the road when this chat gets archived let me note the Developer.Network.com projects are moving to http://sungrid.java.net. That transition should be completed in January 07 and all the example and contest winner projects are expected to be moved.

(Q): Another quick question, what sort of applications will you support on the Sun Grid , I know you currently support Java, but will you support MPI jobs, where the jobs are dependent on being able to communicate with each other with low latency and very frequently? I know GridEngine supports these types of parallel applications, but also requires additional parallel environments to be established, which effectively block out other processes, does this fit into your future models, or will embarrassingly parallel applications only be supported?
Curt Harpold (A): Good question! Sun Grid supports MPI applications today via MPICH. It's already provided and ready to go. In the near future, we will also be supplying Sun ClusterTools 7 for MPI 2 and OpenMPI apps. If there is another parallel environment which is important to you, please make a request and we will consider it for future support.

(Q): Of the paying customers who are using the Sun Grid Computer Utility (the public utility version, not a semi-private one), approximately is the breakout between small & medium versus large enterprises?
Rohit Valia (A): Hi Laura, most of the users of the compute utility are small and medium businesses, including many startups. In addition, as we had publicly announced, see, Sun Highlights Growing Interest in ISV Applications for Solaris 10-Powered Sun Grid Compute Utility at www.network.com, ISVs are getting ready to offer their applications and the customer mix could potentially change as these applications become available in our catalog.

(Q): In the future we a re looking at using VMware to provision some of our LDAP and web servers. Could we use vmotion to move one of our virtual servers into the grid in the event we need to operate in a disaster recovery mode?
Fay Salwen (A): Hi Peter, The current Compute Utility offering for Sun Grid provides a different sort of service than that. Rather than hosting for LDAP and web services, it is more tailored towards compute-intensive, batch oriented applications that would benefit from running quickly on our large-scale infrastructure. Users only submit applications to run, not the images that they will run on. However, we are exploring ideas like yours for a future service offering and would be interested in your thoughts on it. One way to continue the dialog would be to send your ideas to community@community.developer.network.com

(Q): How can I enter for the no cost 50 hour test drive?
Moderator (A): All attendees will receive an email within the next couple of days with specific instructions on how to access the 50-hour test drive.

(Q): what about fault tolerance in Sun Grid?
Curt Harpold (A): The Sun Grid web interface and most of the infrastructure are implemented using redundant servers. Inside the grid, the compute nodes are not set up with any sort of fault tolerance, but there are capabilities to take individual nodes off-line as needed without any impact on jobs running on other nodes, and on-going work is automatically balanced among the online nodes.

(Q): Hello. What sort of customers do you envision (or have) for Sun Grid?
Kris Thorleifsson (A): The ideal customer for Sun Grid is someone who needs a lot of compute power to run complex computations or render large batches of data. These are customers in industries such as financial services, biotechnology and life sciences, media and entertainment, manufacturing, and energy to name a few. See our current customer success stories on existing customers: http://www.sun.com/service/grid/customertestimonials.xml

(Q): Amazon has recently started to offer the Elastic Computer Cloud, at $0.10 per CPU hour, how does this compare/contrast with your offering, and will you be lowering costs anytime soon?
Rohit Valia (A): In Amazon's offer the price of the CPU is not a true utilization based pricing as is the case with Sun Grid. In Sun Grid, you pay for only the CPU time that your application actually uses, not for time that it is idle and is aggregated across all CPU's used by the job. For example, a job that runs for a 1 minutes each on 1000 CPUs, gets charged for 1000 minutes or $17. In addition, Amazon also charges separately for storage and bandwidth, which means you pay for uploading and downloading data. Sun Grid provides a single all inclusive price. Hence, with Amazon, the $0.10 per hour is not your true cost.

(Q): Is the Sun Grid Compute Utility (the public version) sold ONLY on sun.com or are there other channels where it can be purchased?
Rohit Valia (A): The current version is only available via network.com. With the launch of the application catalog a natural channel will be via the ISVs sales channel which will be driving the adoption of their applications on network.com.

(Q): If Sun Grid is available only in the U.S. what are the limitations keeping it from being accessible worldwide?
David Folk (A): I'm sure at first look this sounds like something that should be easy, but note tax laws, export laws, and privacy laws must be considered on a country by country basis.

(Q): Can you conceive of a client who ONLY uses the Sun Grid Compute Utility for its IT operations and has no servers/storage (maybe no data center at all)?
Kris Thorleifsson (A): At this point, no. In it's current form, Sun Grid is a HPC compute grid that is not suitable for running live business processes. Most users today and in the near future look at Sun Grid as a resource that compliments their existing infrastructure. In the future, we can very well conceive of a client who taps into compute utilities such as Sun Grid for all their IT needs. The move to utility computing is something that will be evolve over time, and Sun intends to continue to be at the forefront of that wave.