Sun Grid Hit By Denial Of Service Attack On First Day

Sun Microsystems' Grid, a publicly available computing service, was hit by a denial-of-service network attack on its inaugural day, the company said Wednesday.

To let people try out the Sun Grid, the company made a text-to-speech translation service publicly accessible for, for example, turning blog entries into podcasts. "It became the focus of a denial-of-service attack," Aisling MacRunnels, Sun's senior director of utility computing, said in an interview Wednesday.

In denial-of-service attacks, numerous computers--often groups of compromised PCs called botnets--simultaneously attack a target on the network. In this case, the attack took down the text-to-speech service.

The Sun Grid is one of several visionary ideas that the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company (Quote:SUNW) hopes will restore status and revenue that tapered away after the dot-com bubble burst and its own hardware and software lost much of its cachet.