Powers Unfiltered

The grid computing world is abuzz — Sun has announced the Cool Apps Developer Challenge, with $50,000 in prizes available to developers who put their applications on the Sun Grid Compute Utility.  

Haven’t we been here before?  And more importantly — haven’t we gotten beyond this yet? 

Since early 1999 (at least), there have been prizes related to grid computing.  There were prizes offered by RSA to crack various encryption methods.  There were prizes offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to find the first prime number with more than a million digits (and there’s still one for ten million digits outstanding).  There were bubble-era startups that offered cash prizes for participation in other grid projects while they fumbled around looking for an actual business model. 

Enough already.  It’s 2006.  Grid computing is for getting work done, not for winning prizes.

Here’s our promotion (yeah, we’ll announce it officially Real Soon Now, but in the meantime just contact us…) — get our Digipede Network Developer Edition, including the Digipede Framework SDK, for free.  Use it to grid-enable your application.  (CRN says you’ll have an easier time doing this than building a prizewinner on Sun Grid!)  Go sell your application (and ours, if you like) to your customers (we’ll help).  Win profits, not prizes.  Make your customers happy, not your PR people.   Be successful, not famous.