Grid Apps; Big Bucks

On the heels of yesterday's note about AI and Grid Computing, Sun Microsystems has announced its Cool Apps Contest for Sun Grid Compute Utility, a program to promote grid application development. Now here's the really cool part--up to $100,000 in prizes.

You can compete in two ways: By building an application that runs on Sun Grid Compute Utility, or one that's built with the Compute Server Plugin for NetBeans. First prize for both categories is $15,000. To jumpstart the contest, Sun is offering a promotion of 100 free CPU hours for qualified Sun Grid developers who join Sun's Grid developer community.

Sun's Grid utility service, launched in early 2005, gives users on-demand access to grid's processing power at the rate of $1/CPU hour, along with access to the Sun Grid storage array. The grid currently is made up of servers running about 5000 AMD Opteron processors.

Among other parts of the program, Sun is providing private project spaces for ISVs for developing and porting applications to the grid, and the Compute Server Community Project which gives developers an environment for distributed execution of parallel computations.

For more information on Sun's Grid, see "The Distributed Resource Management Application API" by Frederic Pariente and "Gaps in the Grid" by Shannon Cochran.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 08:48 AM  Permalink