The Sun Grid Compute Utility
TS-1109

Sun Grid, a utility computing platform from Sun Microsystems, provides secure shared access to substantial computing and storage capabilities, exposed as simple to-use resources. A developer can leverage this utility platform to do everything from complex analytics and parallel processing, to load testing of an application, and will pay for only what they consume.

This session is designed to provide an overview of the Sun Grid architecture and usage model and educate on how to harness the resources provided. Attendees will be taken through the process of accessing the Sun Grid utility with a browser, uploading resources, running jobs, and downloading output basically the entire lifecycle, from start to finish.

After a brief background of grids and parallel computing to set the stage, this presentation will provide an overview of the Sun Grid, from a business and technical perspective. It will then describe how to use the Sun Grid, including an explanation of the execution environment and its components and the interfaces for interacting with the grid. A simple Java application will be used as an example to demonstrate the packaging, deployment, and execution steps.

The presentation will then introduce some of the challenges involved in more complex parallel applications. A tool will be demonstrated that does much of the heavy-lifting, leaving developers free to focus on the business processing logic when creating parallel applications to run in the Sun Grid Compute Utility.

Attendees will leave knowing how to access and use the Sun Grid Compute Utility. The talk with wrap up with a discussion of additional resources that are available to help developer verage this new environment.

Attendees should know Java and will benefit from some background in grid/parallel computing.