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I'm appologizing in advance to the guys who will tell me this isn't a tech/server/IT issue!

But I've been beating my head around this for a couple of days now.

I'm trying figure out who to talk to, or which company I can approach to try to see if there are Grid/Cloud Computing companies who have programs setup to deal with colleges.

I'm dealing with a compsci course, and we're looking at a few projects that would require a great deal of computing/computational resources. But in calling different companies (HP/Rackspace/etc..) I'm either not getting through to the right depts, or to the right people, or the companies just aren't setup for this.

There are plenty of companies who have discounts for desktop software/hardware, but who in the biz deals with discounts/offerings for Cloud/Grid Computing solutions??

Any thoughts/pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

-tom

tom smith
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3 Answers3

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You should checkout the Sun GRID. Rackspace does not have a "GRID" or high computing offering as far as I know. Sun charges $1/hr per CPU.

http://www.sun.com/service/sungrid/

iainlbc
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  • hey ian!! fellow usc trojan... what's up, small world. i don't need really fast systems.. i just need a lot of virtual cpu instances! i tried calling the number from the whois, for your website. it rang with now answer... let me know a good way to shout to you about this! thanks -bruce – tom smith May 21 '10 at 22:46
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If you want to build a grid, you might contact Science Tools, which invented grid computing. They did it in the early / mid 1990s for Earth Science work, LONG before the term "grid" was coined by Ian Foster...

Richard T
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How much is "a great deal" of computing resources? years of cpu time? :)

There are lots of 'cloud' providers that could help you out with this. SoftLayer, Rackspace, AWS, NewServers, etc can all help by letting you purchase CPU resources on a per-hour basis. However, if the amount of workload that you have approaches HPC or supercomputer levels, then you'd be better off contacting Sun about their GRID. One of the primary purposes of that GRID was to sell CPU cycles to universities and researchers, and I'd imagine they have most of everything set up for dealing with educational institutions.

Hope this helps!

Tony
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