Jonathan Schwartz touts Sun’s grid initiative with the simple proposition “A buck a CPU hour” and says “Let the price wars begin.” Well, according to a story in the Register, CA warns of a “coordinated malware attack” designed to build a huge botnet. Further, “CA reckons that access to the compromised PCs is for sale on a black market, at prices as low as five cents per PC.” Looks like Sun may not be the low-cost provider after all :-)
Companies like Popular Power, which tried to make a business of offering SetiAtHome-style computing grids, may have been ahead of their time, but whether through an enterprise grid like Sun’s, populist projects like SetiAtHome, or hacker botnets, grid computing is definitely one wave that’s coming at us.