At GridWorld 2006, and now at SuperComputing '06, we have been enabling the conference attendees to meet face to face with Sun Grid engineers, the experts that designed and architected Sun Grid Compute Utility at Network.com.  These have been wildly popular sessions in the past, and have enabled the participants to have an in-depth discussion with our engineers on issues relating to grid technologies.

In order to bring the benefit of the Gridathons to more people, we have created a version of the Gridathon for online consumption by technical audiences. The Online Gridathon consists of a technical presentation, given by our Sun Grid product manager, David Folk, and on December 7, we will run an interactive live chat session that allows our customers to connect directly with Sun Grid engineers and experts. It's not the one-on-one forum we run at the real events, but it comes close. So, view the online video, and mark your calendar for December 7 and join us at a live interacive online chat on Sun Grid.

I spent Thursday and Friday of last week at the Sun sponsored Startup Camp “un-conference”. This is my first “un-conference,” and I have to say it turned out great. Instead of a conference committee selecting the sessions and managing the event tightly, the un-conference participants themselves suggest and choose the sessions. The format is much more informal, and allows for more interaction and makes the conference very dynamic and relevant to the attendees. I'm looking forward to my next un-conference.

We had a session on Sun Grid Compute Utility at Network.com. The utility computing model is especially relevant to startup companies who have little cash to spare, and want to use it to invest in code development and building value add services, as oppose to investing in expensive IT infrastructure. Sun Grid, as it is today, is relevant to startups that are building services that require high massive computing resources to run large HPC batch-type jobs. Check out my previous blog on “Grid Computing to Build National Competitive Advantage”. It provides examples of companies that are ideal for Sun Grid Compute Utility.

Here are a few photos I took at the event:

© 2006 Kristinn Thorleifsson, all rights reserved

I ran into Danese Cooper, who used to hold the title of "Open Source Diva" at Sun. She's now at Intel working on their open source initiatives. She had an interesting talk on how startups can take advantage of open source software.

© 2006 Kristinn Thorleifsson, all rights reserved

We're sponsoring a Startup Camp on November 2-3 in Silicon Valley. This is an event, an "un-conference" that's dedicated at bringing together various members of the startup community for a face-to-face meetup.



The un-conference format is pretty cool. It uses Open Space methodology to allow attendees to control the agenda and ensures that the conference is relevant, vibrant, and interesting. Stephen O'Grady of RedMonk commented on this format in his blog back in July. To join in, just go to the Startup Camp website and sign up.

Check out Sun's Bryan Cantrill on PodTech. Bryan is the Sun staff engineer who created the DTrace technology that received the gold award in the Wall Street Journal 2006 Technology Innovation Award last month. Also check out Bryan's blog here. DTrace is a pretty cool technology in Sun's Solaris 10 Operating System, and is making it's way into Leopard, Apple's next revision of the Mac OS X according the this.

Globalization and increased global competition is causing governments around the world to look at Silicon Valley as a model of how to stay competitive. Our CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, and a number of other Silicon Valley executives such as Apple's Steve Jobs, HP's Mark Hurd, and Cisco's John Chambers, had a chance to sit down with Tony Blair the other day when the British PM visited the west coast. The Prime Minister wanted advice on advancing the Britain's position in the world. See Jonathan's blog about the meeting.


Tony Blair with Steve Jobs and John Chambers. (Photo: Reuters)

The discussion centered around the role of education and R&D to drive economic growth. Silicon Valley is a major growth engine for California and the US. The amount of innovation that is happening here is staggering, and the key driver is the valley's highly educated workforce. There are other factors that help drive this as well such as a legal environment that is friendly to business, access to venture capital, culture that understands and appreciates innovation, and efficient financial markets to name a few.

Information Technology plays an important role in enabling competitive advantage at the national or regional level. Not only do today's most successful businesses take advantage of IT to optimize their performance, improve their operations, and service their customers better, but IT is also at the hearth of scientific discovery. Scientists in various fields require significant computing resources to conduct their research and advance their knowledge. Scientific innovation in turn provides a fertile ground for new business ventures that help fuel economic growth and prosperity that helps governments build and maintain competitive advantage.

Take Sun as an example. Sun Microsystems itself is a company that thrives on innovation. Founded in the early 1980's by graduates of Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley, Sun has succeeded by being able to tap into the Silicon Valley talent pool that is attracted by the area's competitive advantage in scientific research and innovation. The innovation society in Silicon Valley has proved to be an enormous economic growth engine that has enabled the region and the State of California to prosper and grow and deliver benefits to all its citizens.

Here is a prime example of how governments are supporting research and development in the US. Recently we announced that with  grant from the National Science Foundation, the Texas Advanced Computing Center is going to build the world's largest supercomputer using Sun's technology, the very same technology Sun Grid Compute Utility available at Network.com is built on.

I believe that Sun Grid Compute Utility can help federal, state, and local governments build and foster innovation societies in their respective regions that benefits academia, business, and all constituents.

Sun Grid Compute Utility is essentially a “supercomputer” that delivers enormous computational power that is available to academia and business alike. The utility model enables users to get flexible access to these resources at an affordable price without the need to large investments in IT infrastructure. By tapping into Sun's assets, paying only for the compute cycles they need, users can increase data center capacity and better manage project and usage volatility – while transferring risk to Sun. Sun Grid enables businesses, scientists and researchers to optimize performance, speed time to results, and accelerate innovation without investment in IT  nfrastructure build-out and without the long-term life cycle costs related to capital, management and operations, depreciation, and floor space.

Here are some examples of how governments can take advantage of Sun Grid Compute Utility:

Foster Education and Scientific Research:

Sun Grid Compute Utility can enable governments to support universities and research institutions in their regions by providing access to computational power through a utility “pay-as-you-go” model that traditionally has only been available to few, well funded organizations and large corporations.

As an example, this would benefit:
- Academics and research scientists at local universities and research institutions in the fields of bio-technology, life-sciences, electrical engineering, physics, computer science, to name a few.
- Local universities who are planning to build or grow departments that require access to computational resources, but lack the resources to build their own IT infrastructure.  By tapping into a compute utility, educational and research institutions can achieve more with less.

Attract Top Talent:

Access to resources is required to attract highly skilled workforce in the area of science and academia. Computational power as delivered by Sun Grid Compute Utility is one of these resources needed to advance scientific discovery and enable scientists to succeed in their respective fields.

As an example this would benefit:
- Educational and research institutions working on attracting highly skilled research scientists and academics that are at the forefront in their fields.
- Local businesses in the “innovation industries” dependent on a large talent pool of highly skilled workers.

Attract Innovative Businesses:

The strategic importance of IT is playing an ever increasing role in the success both traditional and emerging businesses. An access to supercomputing resource in the area can attract businesses in various industries.

As an example, this would benefit:
- Financial institutions that require computational resources to run complex financial modeling , credit analysis, Dow-Jones forecasting, econometrics, pricing model, stock market, and Monte Carlo type analysis.
- Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies working on molecular drug testing, radiation cancer therapy, or genome research.
- Software vendors looking at establishing their presence in the emerging Software-as-a-Service market, or offer software or IT services that require significant compute power.
- New business ventures and venture capital companies that are looking for a powerful, yet cost effective computational resource to launch their products and services.
- Energy companies needing to process large amounts data for oil well exploration.
- Media and entertainment firms that  to render digital media content and computer animation, hosting online consumer facing applications, and other complex and time intensive calculations.
- Semiconductor manufactures running complex computations in order to design the next generation microprocessors, memory chips, or integrated circuits. - Telecommunication companies that require computational resources to host batch jobs for Voice-over-IP billing services, analytics, or data pre-processing.
- Manufacturing firms requiring computational power for artificial intelligence, robotics, and navigation.

These are just some of the examples that a supercomputing resource such as Sun Grid could benefit governments seeking to build national competitiveness. I can mention a number of examples of companies that are taking advantage of Sun Grid today. I blogged earlier about how CD02, a financial services company, is benefitting from Sun Grid. I should also mention my previous blog about AMD on Sun Grid.

If you're in the US, you can access Sun Grid at Network.com as Sun Grid public utility is currently only available to US-based users. Elsewhere, the Sun Grid model presents an opportunity to service providers and telcos interested providing a similar service in their region and opportunity to team up with Sun on the build-out of a compute utility powered by the Sun Grid IP.

Finally, I'd like to mention that we are already enabling academics to take tap into the power of Sun Grid. Last March, at the Sun Worldwide Education and Research Conference, we announced that we were awarding 10 institutions the Sun Grid Education Grant for 100,000 free promotional CPU hours each on the Sun Grid, continuing on our promise to provide 1 million CPU hours to universities. A number of scientists and academics are taking advantage of this grant to further our knowledge in various fields. Pretty cool stuff if you ask me.

Check out Dave Douglas' tour of Project Blackbox on YouTube.

The reaction I've seen has been pretty positive so far. Carl Howe has a very positive take on this, and says it "could easily be one of the most transformational computing products of the decade".  Nick Carr has an interesting take in this as well.

Late last year a rumor spread around Silicon Valley about a secret Google project, and a revolutionary and innovative concept: A shipping container with a prototype datacenter. Pretty neat idea, don't you think? Project Blackbox has been in development in Sun Laboratories for some time now, and was unveiled today. This Webpronews.com story provides an insight into how someone like Google or YouTube could take advantage of a mobile datacenter to deliver streaming video content without hickup. This is just one example of how a mobile datacenter will fuel the future of the Internet.

Check out Greg's blog for more background info on the project.

Today we introduced a pilot of the world's first virtualized, mobile datacenter, Project Blackbox. The economics of Project Blackbox are pretty compelling for the CIO. The Project Blackbox concept is 1/100th the initial cost if compared to a 10,000sqft datacenter and delivers 3 times more compute power in the same space. Since it's contained (literally) it delivers efficiency of scale and ulitmate flexibility. Suggest you read Jonathan's blog from earlier today about the project and why this latest Sun innovation matters to our customers. I shot a few photos at the launch event today. 

© 2006 Kristinn Thorleifsson – all rights reserved

Sun CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, with CTO Greg Papadopoulos unveiled Project Blackbox out on the parkinglot at the Sun Menlo Park headquarters. I picked up this little eighteen-wheeler toy truck at the launch for my desk.

Here’s a question – how many bills do you pay every month? I made the mistake of asking myself this recently and had to give up mid-count after running out of fingers. Chances are good you’re beholden to all sorts of companies at the moment: TiVO, broadband, interactive gaming, mobile device, satellite dish, and the granddaddy of them all, the cell phone. Now the fun part of the question – how many of those bills are pay-as-you-go? Not many I assume.

The complaint used to be that our advances in technology had tied us down with wires. Since we rid ourselves of those, the tech behemoths have found another way to chain us to our devices – contracts and commitments.  We’ve officially entered the Age of Technological Confinement. The chief offender is of course the cell phone contract. It binds like almost no other.  You probably can't buy a mobile phone in the US today without committing to a two year contract. If you’re lucky, you have a contract with flexible minutes. If not, you stare at your bill each month, shaking your head in disbelief at the number of minutes that either disappear unused or skyrocket your bill into new dimensions with overage charges. (And why aren't the cool mobile phones they have in Europe and Japan available in the US? Maybe that's a subject for another blog entry).

And just because a commitment is more subtle doesn’t make it less painful. How many times have you paged through the selection on your television, remarking on the multitude of channels you’ve never even visited? Should you be charged the same monthly rate as your couch potato neighbor who watches 12 hours a day? Of course not. But you are and, frankly, there’s not a thing you can do about it.

How wonderful – and liberating – would it be if TiVO only charged for the programs you recorded? Or your satellite company charged by the number of channels you actually watched? Let me take the daydreaming one step further. Picture a cell phone company that charges you a fixed rate per minute. You talk for five minutes, you pay for five minutes. Period. If you own an iPod, you enjoy a taste of this future with iTunes. In fact, many users claim this feature as the most attractive of the whole package – the ability to buy only the songs you want without the “commitment” of an entire album. On the other hand, there is the obligation of buying a $400 device to enjoy this freedom!

If all that sounds like an impossible future, you should check out Sun Grid Compute Utility. We’ve never understood the point of tying people down and would like nothing better than to usher out the Age of Technological Confinement. Utility Computing simply couldn’t be easier. Risk-free, no limits, no contracts, no commitments. Computing power when  you need it. Period. Your small business needs to crunch some big numbers in a hurry? Just plug into the Sun Grid, do what you need and get out of there. No need for large investment in infrastructure,  no long-term commitment like with financed or hosted models, and no worries about maintenance, cooling, power, or carrying the asset on your books. Have no need for the Grid next day/week/month? You won’t hear a word from us. Promise. I’ll even quote you a price right now: $1/CPU-hr. There are already a number of customers taking advantage of Sun Grid Compute Utility today, and paying only for the compute power they consume. To kick the tires, you can request a Sun Grid account today on Network.com.

We had Fleet Week in San Francisco October 5-10. It's the 60th anniversary of the US Navy Blue Angels, and as usually they put on a pretty good show. Here are a few of the photos I took on Saturday on and around the Golden Gate Bridge.

© 2006 Kristinn Thorleifsson, all rights reserved

Someone posted a comment on this blog asking for information on architecture of supercomputers. I'm not sure that I'm qualified to discuss supercomputing architectures in general, but I can point to some resources for the Sun Grid architecture, the world's first publicly available supercomputing resource. The best resource for info on the
Sun Grid architecture is probably the Sun Grid Developer's Guide that can be found here. 

The Sun Grid Architecture diagram below provides the high level view of how it works. In addition to the compute nodes powered by AMD Opteron Processors and running Solaris 10, and N1 Grid Engine, Sun Grid provides subsystems for billing, payment, metering and monitoring, job submission and storage. The front end is html based and provides access to the grid via Network.com. Job submission is as simple as packaging your work and uploading, describing the job to the system, running it, and retrieving the results.  All available on an on-demand, pay as you go utility model that is priced at $1/CPU-hr. Compute time can be purchased using EBay's PayPal service, or directly from Sun.


A larger image is available here.

Hope that helps. For more resources, check out the Sun Grid Developer Community, and also our soultions center for High Performance Computing, our HPC resources on Sun.com, and the page on N1 Grid Engine. Also check out some of the blogs the Sun Grid engineers maintain, such as Dan Templeton.

This is cool. Last week we announced that Sun is teaming up with University if Texas at Austin, Cornell, and Arizona State to build the world's fastest supercomputer capable of 400 trillion calculations per second. This is made possible with a $59 million grant to the Texas Advanced Computing Center from the National Science Foundation. Currently the fastest supercomputer in the world is across the San Francisco Bay in the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, capable of 280 trillion calculations per second. The Texas supercomputer will be available to academics and research scientists for various projects. It's built using the same technology as Sun Grid Compute Utilty and powered by the AMD processor. This resource is avialable to anyone with an Internet connection trough Sun Grid @ Network.com. For more details see Jonathan's blog on Wednesday.

At GridWorld one of the attention grabbers was the Sun Fire x4100 server we had on display to allow people to get a close look. A couple of people asked if this was a free giveaway. Sorry, no, but the Sun Fire x4100 is one of the Sun products that is available for a free 60-day trial. This is one of the servers that Sun's employee number one, and Sun co-founder, Andy Bechtolsheim, has designed. (Andy also holds the distinction of being Google's initial angel investor, which is pretty cool given where their stock is at right now). Andy's design is pretty cool. Maintenance is easy and the servers enable system managers to hot swap components while the servers is running. Here is Andy demoing the x4600 server.

   
Sun Fire x4100.  The fans are hot swappable and can be pulled out while the servers is running.
 
   
Power supply can be easily removed. And so are the hard drives that are located on the front for ease of maintenance.

I mentioned earlier that our technology partner, AMD, is now tapping into the power of Sun Grid to simulate processor performance on their next generation chip. AMD has its own internal grid, but is taking advantage of Sun Grid Compute Utility to ensure they have enough compute power to get the job done. By doing this AMD is getting access to additional capacity without needing to make the capital investment required to expand their inhouse grid infrastructure. In their estimation this allows them to avoid over 1 million dollars of capital investment. Other benefits they are seeing are: faster time to market, and more flexibility as Sun Grid is a utility that can be dialed up or dialed down based on AMD's need at any given time. Plus they expect to be able to achive better utilization on their existing resources. These are just a few of the benefits of using a publicly available compute utility. For more details on AMD's experience with Sun Grid, check out the case study on AMD on Sun Grid. 

We just wrapped up the Sun Grid Cool Apps Developer Challenge and have announced the winners. See here for details. We are looking at launching antoher fun challenge for software developers interested in taking advantage of Sun Grid sometime later this fall. Stay tuned. To be notified of any future developer contests sign up for the Sun Grid Developer Community. I should also mention that qualified members of the developer community get 100 free promotional CPU hours on Sun Grid to work with. 

I haven't posted an entry on this blog for a while, but I've been quite busy with work lately, plus I took two trips in early September. I popped over to Europe for a week, and then I spent a week in Washington DC at the GridWorld conference and expo. Grid World is one of the premier IT industry events that is focused on integrated grid and distributed computing technologies.

We made a couple of announcements at GridWorld that drew some attention.  First, we announced that we are expanding our program that enables software vendors to offer their applications on the Sun Grid Compute Utility. Secondly, we announced that our technology partner, Advanced Micro Devices, AMD, is tapping into the power of Sun Grid to simulate processor performance to ensure compliance with the most stringent requirements. More on that later.

A number of our top Sun Grid engineers attended the event, and we set up a pretty cool "Gridathon" bootcamp to enable the conference attendees to meet with them on a one-on-one basis to engage in an in-depth technical discussion on Sun Grid, how best to ready and deploy software applications to Sun Grid and the Solaris 10 Operating System, and how they best to take advantage of Sun Grid and the Sun Grid Engine software and other technologies. It turned out to be a great success. From what I saw most of the attendees really appreciated being able to meet and get free consulting time with Sun's engineers to discuss their particular questions get direct feedback on their projects. I've decided that we will put some version of this Gridathon online so that more people can access to this material, so stay tuned.

Sun also received the Reader's Choice Award from the GridToday publication for the best price/performance grid solution or building block. Our Vice President of Engineering for Sun Grid, Jim Parkinson, accepted the award on behalf of Sun.

    
The Sun Grid team at GridWorld in Washington DC.  Jim Parkinson accepts the GridToday Reader's Choice Award.

Check this out: A couple of developers who are participating in our Sun Grid Cool Apps Developer Challenge decided to do the programming on the beach in Italy. I agree that "Mixing traveling, beach, gastronomy and programming is REALLY cool!" I'm looking forward to seeing their application, and the other apps the other participatns are working on. The Cool Apps contest will wrap up by the end of this month, but stay tuned. We are working on kicking off another developer contest for Sun Grid developers later in the fall.

If you like photography, you should check out Rebekka's photo site. No wonder her site is one the most visited site on flickr, with somewhere around 1.6 million hits. Her images are pretty cool. Check it out.  The Guardian in the UK ran a story on her over the weekend.

Yesterday we announced that Sun is teaming up with MediaGrid.Org open standards group to help define and advance international standards for processing, storing, and distributing digital media content on grid computing environments. The work that the Grid Institute's Media Grid is taking on order to define and drive these infrastructure standards is important, and we are pretty excited about being a member of the team. Dan Hushon, our Chief Technologist for Sun Grid, was also appointed a one-year fellowship to participate in the effort.  Aaron E. Walsh is the Grid Institute's Founding Director and has been the primus motor behind Media Grid.

     

By tapping into the power of Sun Grid Compute Utility at Network.com, CDO2 has been able to reduce time to market of its pricing and risk technology products and services. This is a prime example of a company in the financial services industry that is benefiting from a public compute utility without the need to make large capital investments in IT infrastructure; Sun Grid has made compute power an operational expense as oppose to a capital expense. A change that I am sure would be welcomed by many CFO's tired of carrying the high capital cost of IT on their books. The Sun Grid model allows customers to access an enourmous compute power over the network as needed, and we only charge them for what they use, no reservation required, and no long-term contracts required. Compare that to the traditional hosting model that requires customers to make long-term commitments, sets aside dedicated compute resources, and charges them a fixed price for these resources regardless of utilitzation and consumption. In a true compute utility model, utilitzation is the vendor's headache, not the customer's. The same goes for power, space, amortization, and maintenance. This is like taking a Taxi cab. You just pay the fare, and don't have to worry about oil change, tires, gas, and windshield wipers, or the driver's health care plan. No commitment. The Taxi just drops you off where you want to go.

In the case of CDO2, they have been able to shorten time to market significantly, reducing computation time from hours to minutes. In addition, they are able to service more customers than before. By using Sun Grid instead of in-house grids or network of desktop computers for their compute-intensive applications, they estimate that their addressable target market has grown tenfold! Sun Grid has enabled this particular customer to grow its business and develop a highly scalable business model without the constraints of IT investments. Talk about benefits.

What about security? This is sensitive financial data, right? Sun Grid is designed from the ground up as a secure environment and offers multi-layered defenses around critical information assets. It also runs on Sun's Solaris 10 Operating System.

For those interested in learning more about the benefits CDO2 has realized by using Sun Grid, check out this summary.

© 2006 Kristinn Thorleifsson, all rights reserved

The Sun Grid Cool Apps Developer Challenge gives developers an opportunity to build a cool application for Sun Grid Compute Utility at Network.com, or an application that takes advantage of the Compute Server Plug-in for Netbeans and win $50,000 in prizes.  The deadline to participate is approaching fast, get your submissions in by August 31st, 2006. 

Click here for complete rules and details.

This month's issue of Wired Magazine has a cool mentioning of Sun Grid Compute Utility at Network.com Page 42 has an item about who are the biggest recipients of US Government Supercomputer time grants, and 2/3 down the text it says: "Luckily, there's a new option: Sun Microsystems has launched grid computing for the masses. Now any schmo itching for some high-fidelity ray-tracing can do it for just $1 per CPU hour."

Right on. Sun Grid Compute Utility is exactly that: Computing Power to the People. Sun Grid provides research scientists an easy access to enourmous compute power over the Network and without the need for large investments in IT infrastructure. It's a compute utility, and customers only pay for what they use, starting at $1 with no long term contracts or lock-in. We have a great example of a customer of ours, Applied Biosystems, who achieved faster time to results and reduced cost by tapping into the power of Sun Grid at Network.com. 

Here is a link to the customer case study on Applied Bio and other Sun Grid customers.

Sun is a fun place to work. One our traditions are our April Fool's Jokes.  In the early years of Sun, employees, usually a group of engineers, staged elaborate gags involving one of the executives.  In 1990 the pranksters installed an enourmous arrow in Scott McNealy's office. In 1988 the team removed all the furniture from Scott's office and turned it into a one hole golf course that included both a sand hole and water hazard.

In 1985 Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, then a Sun Vice President, was the target of that year's April Fool's Joke. A group of engineers moved all the furniture from his office and set it up in a middle of a pond on the Sun campus. The following year, Eric was yet again the the target. Someone sent me this video clip from a local TV station that ran a story on it.

A very interesting article in the New York Times today on Google's infrastructure build out. Anyone who thinks Google is just a search engine is mistaken. They not only assemble their own hardware, but they also operate huge data centers. Someone told me that the number 2 expense at Google (number 1 being payroll) is electricity. These data centers consume exuberant amount of energy.  This is why Sun's latest line of servers is gaining such momentum in the market. 

The Sun Grid Cool Apps Challenge provides developers a with a great opportunity to develop applications that take advantage of the world's first and only true compute utility delivered over the network.  Developers, especially Java developers, are at the forefront of innovation, and enabling and empowering developers has always been one of Sun's top priorities. As our new CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, pointed out at the Gartner ITExpo last week, what developers are working on is the leading indicator of where our industry is heading.

It's in the spirit of innovation that we launched the Cool Apps Challenge and are giving qualified developers 100 free promotional CPU hours on the Sun Grid. We strongly believe at utility computing is the way of the future for the IT industry, as does this gentleman, and the contest is aimed at enabling developers to start building apps that take advantage of our compute utilty and the power of thousands of servers delivered over the network.

I read Greg Namrocki's blog entry on our contest. Our Chief Technologist for Sun Grid, Dan Hushon, provides some thoughts on Greg's viewpoint in his blog today. 

Sun Grid was featured on a WallSt.net podcast on May 22nd. Our Sr. Director of Utility Computing, Aisling MacRunnels, spoke with WallSt.net tech editor, Dane Grace about Sun Grid and utility computing.

To listen to the podcast:
1)  Go to http://www.wallst.net/podcasts/wallst_dane/dane.asp#  Click on Techtopia Part 6
2)  Sign up for a free membership
3)  After a 7 minute recap of the IT news of the week, you'll hear Aisling's 16 minute interview. 

Calling all developers.  At the JavaOne Developer Conference last week we kicked off our Sun Grid Developer Challenge:

Developers taking part in the contest will compete to win $50,000 in Sun's Cool Apps Contest for Sun Grid Compute Utility. Developers can choose to compete in two ways, either by building the coolest app that runs on Sun Grid Compute Utility, or by creating the coolest app built with the Compute Server Plugin for NetBeans. First prize for both categories is $15,000, with $5,000 awarded to two runners ups in each category. Total of $50,000 in Prizes!

See here for complete contest rules and details. 

So here I go. This is my "Hello World" posting as I join the 1,000+ Sun Microsystems' employees in blogosphere.