Sun Cloud was an on-demand

Cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over m ...

service operated by

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, ...

prior to its acquisition by

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells da ...

. The Sun Cloud Compute Utility provided access to a substantial computing resource over the Internet for US$1 per CPU-hour. It was launched as Sun Grid in March 2006. It was based on and supported

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

technologies such as Solaris 10, Sun Grid Engine, and the

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

platform. Sun Cloud delivered enterprise computing power and resources over the Internet, enabling developers, researchers, scientists and businesses to optimize performance, speed time to results, and accelerate innovation without investment in

IT infrastructure Information technology infrastructure is defined broadly as a set of information technology (IT) components that are the foundation of an IT service; typically physical components ( computer and networking hardware and facilities), but also vari ...

. In early 2010 Oracle announced it was discontinuing the Sun Cloud project. Since Sunday, March 7, 2010, the network.com web site has been inaccessible.

Suitable applications

A typical application that could run on the Compute Utility fit the following parameters: * must be self-contained * runs on the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) * is implemented with standard object libraries included with the Solaris 10 OS or user libraries packaged with the executable ** all executable code must be available on the Compute Utility at time of execution * runs to completion under control of shell scripts (no requirement for interactive access) * has a total maximum size of applications and data that does not exceed 10

gigabyte The gigabyte () is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix '' giga'' means 109 in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one gigabyte is one billion bytes. The unit symbol for the gigabyte is GB. This defini ...

s * can be packaged for upload to Sun Cloud as one or more

ZIP Zip, Zips or ZIP may refer to: Common uses * ZIP Code, USPS postal code * Zipper or zip, clothing fastener Science and technology Computing * ZIP (file format), a compressed archive file format ** zip, a command-line program from Info-ZIP * Zi ...

files of 300

megabyte The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Its recommended unit symbol is MB. The unit prefix ''mega'' is a multiplier of (106) in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one megabyte is one million bytes o ...

s or smaller

Resources, jobs, and runs

Resources are collections of files that contain the user's data and executable. Jobs are a Compute Utility concept that define the elements of the unit of work that is submitted to the Sun Cloud Compute Utility. The major elements of a job include the name of the

shell script A shell script is a computer program designed to be run by a Unix shell, a command-line interpreter. The various dialects of shell scripts are considered to be scripting languages. Typical operations performed by shell scripts include file manip ...

controlling program execution, required arguments to the shell script, and a list of resources that must be in place for the job to run. A run is a specific instantiation of a Job description submitted to the Sun Cloud Compute Utility. Runs occur when the job is submitted to the Compute Utility for execution.

CPU-hour

For each job one submits and runs on the Cloud, the Sun Cloud CPU usage is aggregated and then rounded up to the nearest whole hour. For example, if a job used 1000 CPUs for one minute, it would be aggregated as 1000 CPU minutes or 16.67 CPU hours. The software rounds this up to 17 hours and the job would be billed as US$17.

Application catalog

On March 13, 2007, Sun announced the launch of Application Catalog, an online service that allows developers and ISVs to develop and publish their applications, enabling communities of scientists and academics in life sciences, education, engineering, and other fields to accelerate innovation and complete research projects quickly and less expensively. The Network.com Application Catalog gives users immediate online access to popular ISV and open-source applications through an easy-to-use Web portal with no contractual obligation. Users can upload and run their own applications and create a personal library of favorites or take advantage of the pre-installed and configured applications giving them instant productivity. The portal gives them everything they need to conduct analysis and complete complex computational tasks to help speed scientific discovery and shorten the time to market for new products. They simply select the application, upload their data, and get results fast. Network.com enables anyone to publish applications to the Application Catalog and take advantage of the powerful Solaris 10-based Cloud platform. Users can publish their own applications to a private library and access them whenever they want; they can also share their applications with others while retaining their data securely in their private space.

Available applications

Applications available on the Catalog include (by category): * General -

Blender A blender (sometimes called a mixer or liquidiser in British English) is a kitchen and laboratory appliance used to mix, crush, purée or emulsify food and other substances. A stationary blender consists of a blender container with a rotating me ...

, FDS *

Computer Aided Engineering Computer-aided engineering (CAE) is the broad usage of computer software to aid in engineering analysis tasks. It includes , , , durability and optimization. It is included with computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing ( ...

Calculix CalculiX is a free and open-source finite-element analysis application that uses an input format similar to Abaqus. It has an implicit and explicit solver (CCX) written by Guido Dhondt and a pre- and post-processor (CGX) written by Klaus Wittig.

, deal.II, Elmer Solver, Impact,

FreeFEM FreeFem++ is a programming language and a software focused on solving partial differential equations using the finite element method. FreeFem++ is written in C++ and developed and maintained by Université Pierre et Marie Curie and Laboratoire Jac ...

, OFELI *

Life Sciences This list of life sciences comprises the branches of science that involve the scientific study of life – such as microorganisms, plants, and animals including human beings. This science is one of the two major branches of natural science, th ...

BLAST Blast or The Blast may refer to: *Explosion, a rapid increase in volume and release of energy in an extreme manner *Detonation, an exothermic front accelerating through a medium that eventually drives a shock front Film * ''Blast'' (1997 film), ...

FASTA FASTA is a DNA and protein sequence alignment software package first described by David J. Lipman and William R. Pearson in 1985. Its legacy is the FASTA format which is now ubiquitous in bioinformatics. History The original FASTA program ...

, GROMACS,

Clustalw Clustal is a series of widely used computer programs used in bioinformatics for multiple sequence alignment. There have been many versions of Clustal over the development of the algorithm that are listed below. The analysis of each tool and its ...

, eHITS,

T-Coffee T-Coffee (Tree-based Consistency Objective Function for Alignment Evaluation) is a multiple sequence alignment software using a progressive approach. It generates a library of pairwise alignments to guide the multiple sequence alignment. It can a ...

, fastDNAml, READSEQ Examples of types of suitable applications include: * Bio informatics * Financial domain applications, like

Monte Carlo method Monte Carlo methods, or Monte Carlo experiments, are a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. The underlying concept is to use randomness to solve problems that might be deter ...

, Black–Scholes option pricing models * Computer Arts, like

Fractal In mathematics, a fractal is a geometric shape containing detailed structure at arbitrarily small scales, usually having a fractal dimension strictly exceeding the topological dimension. Many fractals appear similar at various scales, as il ...

landscape generation * Speech synthesis applications, lik
Festival
* Scientific applications, like

Computer simulation Computer simulation is the process of mathematical modelling, performed on a computer, which is designed to predict the behaviour of, or the outcome of, a real-world or physical system. The reliability of some mathematical models can be dete ...

References

External links

Sun CloudUtility ComputingSun Grid Engine SourceSun Grid Module Suite for NetBeans IDE
{{Sun Microsystems Cloud computing providers Cloud infrastructure Cloud platforms Cloud storage Sun Microsystems