Yesterday I heard that the Sun Grid Compute Utility was going online this week and today it went live. As soon as I heard the news I went to the site and applied for an account. Even though I already have a Sun login I was not permitted immediate access.

Due to U.S. export restrictions Sun is required to verify that only United States citizens are using the service. In order to get a Sun Grid account I had to fill out a brief questionnaire and wait for approval. I answered the questions in a few minutes at lunch. By the time I checked my e-mail tonight I was pleased to see my application had been approved.

Navigating to network.com I was greeted with a nice home page and from there I "Entered the Grid". After logging in I landed on the Jobs page of a familiar tabbed UI. Since it was my first visit to the grid Sun helpfully provided a set of four sample jobs to get me up and running - SPHot, hostname, Hello World, and Cepstral Text to Speech. The hostname app does nothing more that display the hostname and is totally inappropriate as a grid app, but it provides an ultra simple example to kick off your first grid job.

Having arrived at the Jobs page I began exploring and immediately discovered a roadblock. The upper right corner showed that I had a CPU-Hour account balance of zero. This had to be corrected before I could proceed. I clicked on "Buy Additional CPU-Hours" and ran into a minor snag. Sun Grid detected that I had popup blocking turned on and forced me to turn it off before proceeding.

After clearing the popup issue I was taken to a screen requesting my PayPal login information. Logging into PayPal revealed that I needed to verify my home address. This was rectified easily via a billing address confirmation at PayPal and then came my big purchase; a hefty $1.00 payment to Sun for a single CPU-Hour. I was ready to launch a job on the grid.

Returning to the jobs page at Sun Grid revealed the same set of jobs I'd seen before so I kicked off the hostname job via a checkbox and the "Run Now" button. The system then displayed a popup informing me that the job had been submitted. This page displayed the name of the job and a unique job ID. It also showed a Run Status of Pending. I closed the popup and half expected a 3270 screen to appear with a TSO prompt. Happily, no such beast appeared.

Having submitted my first job I navigated to the Runs tab of the UI. This tab showed the results of my hostname job. As you can see in the screenshot below the grid revealed that my job number 3008 ran successfully and used a grand total of 0.000 CPU hours. However, I was billed for 1 CPU Hour! What?! It cost me a $1.00 to run the hostname command? It's time to go reread the terms and conditions.

Clicking over to the the "My Account" page confirmed my billing status. Yep, I'd been billed a dollar for the hostname command. Not good. I'll have to dig into this issue further - surely Sun won't be billing on full CPU-Hour increments. Update: Sun's FAQ #22 addresses this issue. The charges are rounded up to the nearest dollar so any single job will cost at least a dollar.

This quick tour wouldn't be complete without showing the other two tabs in Sun's grid interface so below you'll find screenshots of the "Resources" and "References" pages. These are fairly self explanatory. Resources are files necessary to run your jobs and References are links to Sun Grid documentation.

Other than the $1.00 charge for the hostname command, my first experience with Sun's Grid was a good one. I can easily see this facility being useful to those in need of huge compute resources. If you don't want to maintain your own data center this could really be a godsend.

Hey Jonathan, can I get a $1.00 credit for that hostname job?