Low cost grids for research and business

Many researchers and business are looking to purchase small clusters or deploy grids for their high end applications. For many organizations this is causing quite a strain on existing infrastructure in terms of power consumption and air conditioning load, especially when multiple departments
may be independently purchasing their own clusters. For those who only need a small cluster a better solution may be the soon to be announced Amazon EC2 service or the Windows Grid solution "Alchemi" developed at Melbourne University by Dr. Rajkumar Buyya's team.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables "compute" in the cloud. Because the EC2 service is a web service it could be easily coupled through workflow to a user's application. For example if a user had developed a proprietary computation model - they could offer the model as a web service to prospective customers or other third parties who then use EC2 as the computational engine.

As Gary Finely of Westgrid pointed out: "EC2 is pretty amazingly cheap too. Their $2/hr for a 20-node cluster is microscopic compared to the capital and personnel costs that a research group would pay for 20 machines. Probably about covers their AC power bill. I would think that academics at
institutions too small to build and maintain their own computer clusters would find this of real value. However, I note that Sun was running a similar CPU-on-demand service last year, and as far as I know it withered away from lack of market interest."

The other low cost alternative grid technology was developed by Dr. Rajkumar Buyya at Melbourne University called Alchemi. Alchemi is a "SETI-like" grid tooll built as an open source software framework that allows you to painlessly aggregate the computing power of Windows networked machines into a virtual supercomputer (desktop grid) and to develop applications to run on the grid. It is built on the Microsoft .Net platform. Thanks to Richard Ackerman, Gary Finley and Raj Buyya for these pointers--BSA]
For information on Alchemi: http://www.alchemi.net/

For information on Amazon EC2: http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=201590011