Sun Grid: $84,000 per day

Sun formally launched its Sun Grid service (which I blogged about here), with 5,000 sockets, a year after first announcing it. If 70 percent of the current computing pool were used on a daily basis, Sun would rake in about $84,000 per day. In a Bloomberg story, Aisling MacRunnels, senior director of utility computing, said that running a complex financial simulationg for one minute on 1,000 CPUs would cost $17. Customers at launch include Applied BioSystems, CDO2 and Virtual Compute Corporation, and software developers are working with Sun to optimize and port applications to the Sun Grid.  

I talked to Shankar Trivedi, vice president and chief marketing officer at Callidus Software, who plans to use the Sun Grid to process transactions for its on demand incentive management application. "It's like a payroll run, except for processing incentive compensation," Trivedi said. "Each customer's workload is different--with the Sun Grid we can scale to meet variable needs." The company has also outsourced its infrastructure to Sun for Callidus On Demand (the company also has an on-premises version). This is the win/win situation for Sun--hosting application infrastructure and selling Grid cycles as part of a holistic solution.  However, Callidus doesn't have any customers yet for its on demand application.