The Sun Grid data processing service suffered a denial
of service attack on its first day of operations this week, as
remote attackers tried to crash the network.
The data processing network became officially open for business
yesterday, and Sun made available a text-to-speech translation
service for those wanting to try out the service.
This test service could be used for instance, to turn blog
entries into podcasts.
However, a co-ordinated denial of service attack by a large
number of remote computers connecting to the service tried to swamp
the system and take it down.
To counter the attack, Sun moved the publicly available
text-to-speech service to a protected part of the grid, where users
had to sign in to get access.
Sun said the attack did not degrade performance for users
connecting to the paid-for part of the grid that requires
registration.
Sun Grid is aimed at large companies and institutions that need
to access flexible amounts of data processing power, to handle
peaks and troughs in their business or to deal with special
projects.