Sun Cloud (also known as Network.com) was an on-demand

cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

service operated by

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

prior to Sun's acquisition by

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American Multinational corporation, multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Co-founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison, who remains executive chairman, Oracle was ...

. The Sun Cloud Compute Utility provided access to a substantial computing resource over the Internet for

US$ The United States dollar (Currency symbol, symbol: Dollar sign, $; ISO 4217, currency code: USD) is the official currency of the United States and International use of the U.S. dollar, several other countries. The Coinage Act of 1792 introdu ...

1 per CPU-hour. It was launched as Sun Grid in March 2006—the same month

Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Amazon that provides Software as a service, on-demand cloud computing computing platform, platforms and Application programming interface, APIs to individuals, companies, and gover ...

began offering their first IT infrastructure services. 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 and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

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

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

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 hardware, computer and networking hardware and facilitie ...

. 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: * 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 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 command languages. Typical operations performed by shell scripts include file manipu ...

s (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 SI prefix, prefix ''giga-, giga'' means 109 in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one gigabyte is one billion bytes. The unit symbol for the gigabyte i ...

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

s or smaller

Resources, jobs, and runs

Resources are collections of files that contain the user's data and executable. A ''job'' is a Compute Utility concept that defines 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

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 submitted and ran on the Cloud, the Sun Cloud CPU usage was aggregated and then rounded up to the nearest whole hour. For example, if a job used 1,000 CPUs for one minute, it would be aggregated as 1,000 CPU minutes, or 16.67 CPU hours, then rounded up to 17 hours; the job would then be billed as US$17.

Application catalog

On March 13, 2007, Sun announced the launch of Application Catalog, an online service that allowed 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'' gave users immediate online access to popular ISV and open-source applications through an easy-to-use Web portal with no contractual obligation. Users could 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 gave users everything they needed to conduct analysis and complete complex computational tasks to help speed scientific discovery and shorten the time to market for new products. Users would select the application, upload their data, and get results quickly. Network.com enabled anyone to publish applications to the Application Catalog and take advantage of the Solaris 10-based cloud platform. Users could publish their own applications to a private library and access them whenever they wanted; they could also share their applications with others while retaining their data securely in their private space.

Available applications

Applications available on the Catalog included (by category): * General - Blender, FDS * Computer Aided Engineering - Calculix, 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, ...

- BLAST, FASTA,

GROMACS GROMACS is a molecular dynamics package mainly designed for simulations of proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids. It was originally developed in the Biophysical Chemistry department of University of Groningen, and is now maintained by contributors ...

, Clustalw, eHITS, T-Coffee, fastDNAml, READSEQ Examples of types of suitable applications included: * 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 ...

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

Fractal In mathematics, a fractal is a Shape, 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 scale ...

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

Computer simulation Computer simulation is the running of a mathematical model on a computer, the model being designed to represent the behaviour of, or the outcome of, a real-world or physical system. The reliability of some mathematical models can be determin ...

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 Computer-related introductions in 2006