Sun Cloud
| Company type | Service |
|---|---|
| Industry | Cloud computing |
| Founded | March 2006 |
| Founder | Sun Microsystems |
| Defunct | March 7, 2010 |
| Fate | Service terminated after Oracle acquisition |
| Headquarters | United States |
Area served | Worldwide |
| Products | Cloud computing platform, Sun Cloud Compute Utility, Network.com Application Catalog |
| Parent | Sun Microsystems (until acquisition by Oracle Corporation) |
Sun Cloud—also referred to as Network.com—was a cloud computing platform provided on demand by Sun Microsystems prior to its acquisition by Oracle Corporation. The service, known as the Sun Cloud Compute Utility, delivered significant processing power via the Internet at a rate of US$1 per CPU-hour. Initially introduced in March 2006 under the name Sun Grid—coinciding with the launch of Amazon Web Services' inaugural IT infrastructure offerings—it leveraged open source components such as Solaris 10, Sun Grid Engine, and the Java environment.
This platform enabled enterprises, developers, scientists, and researchers to access scalable computing capabilities remotely, facilitating enhanced performance, faster innovation cycles, and diminished capital expenditure on IT infrastructure.
Oracle declared the termination of Sun Cloud services in early 2010. Since March 7, 2010, the network.com website has been offline.
Suitable applications
Applications suitable for deployment on the Compute Utility were required to meet these criteria:
- Operate independently without external dependencies
- Be compatible with the Solaris 10 operating system
- Utilize either standard Solaris 10 libraries or include any necessary user libraries within the executable
- All executable components must be present on the Compute Utility at runtime
- Execute to completion through shell script automation without requiring interactive input
- Maintain a combined application and data size not exceeding 10 gigabytes
- Be packaged in one or multiple ZIP archives each no larger than 300 megabytes for upload purposes
Resources, jobs, and runs
Resources refer to sets of user-provided executables and data files.
A job represents a discrete workload submitted to Sun Cloud, encompassing the controlling shell script, its parameters, and all associated resources.
A run denotes an individual execution occurrence of a submitted job within the Compute Utility environment.
CPU-hour
The platform measured CPU consumption per job and rounded usage up to the nearest full hour for billing calculations. For instance, a task utilizing 1,000 CPUs for one minute accrued 16.67 CPU-hours, which was rounded up to 17 hours and billed at US$17.
Application catalog
Introduced on March 13, 2007, the Network.com Application Catalog allowed developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) to publish applications on Sun’s Solaris 10-based cloud infrastructure. Targeting sectors such as science, education, and engineering, it fostered rapid innovation by granting immediate access to widely used ISV and open-source software through an intuitive web interface without requiring contractual commitments.
Users had the option to upload and execute their own applications, maintain private software libraries, or utilize pre-installed programs to perform complex computational tasks effectively. The system supported secure private repositories and enabled controlled sharing features designed to promote collaboration while safeguarding data integrity.
Available applications
The Catalog included software spanning multiple disciplines:
- General: Blender, FDS
- Computer Aided Engineering: Calculix, deal.II, Elmer Solver, Impact Finite Element Program, FreeFEM, OFELI
- Life Sciences: BLAST, FASTA, GROMACS, Clustalw, eHITS, T-Coffee, fastDNAml, READSEQ
Accepted application types encompassed bioinformatics; financial analytics such as Monte Carlo methods and Black–Scholes option valuation; digital arts including fractal landscape creation; speech synthesis tools like Festival; and various scientific simulation programs.
See also
- Big Buck Bunny – an open-source animated movie created using Sun Cloud resources
- Utility computing
- Platform as a service